We’re incredibly proud to celebrate a milestone for our team: Paula Ebner’s first scientific publication is out. Together with our team lead, Dr. Jessica Szczuka, she published “Understanding Romantic Relationships Between Humans and Chatbots: A Qualitative and Quantitative Study on Romantic Fantasy and Other Interpersonal Characteristics” in Technology, Mind, and Behavior, an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal at the intersection of psychology and technology.
The study combines quantitative data from verified participants with qualitative interviews to explore what makes romantic human-chatbot relationships more or less intense. One key finding: romantic fantasy was the strongest predictor of relationship intensity, while loneliness did not significantly predict intensity in this sample.
Behind the publication lies a lot of hard-won learning. Recruitment was one of the biggest challenges, finding people genuinely in romantic relationships with chatbots meant building a verification process from scratch to filter out bots and fake participants. Turning a wealth of findings into a coherent paper, and finding the right home for research at the intersection of psychology, technology, and intimacy, took persistence too. As Paula put it: “Almost nothing went according to the original plan, but I think the study is better for it.”
For Dr. Szczuka, watching a PhD student’s first publication come together is a milestone of its own: “What makes me particularly proud is not just the publication itself, but seeing young researchers develop into independent scientists with their own voice, ideas, and ambitions.”
This work is an important step for Paula as an early-career researcher, and it shows how careful empirical work can help us understand a topic that’s often sensationalized, stigmatized, or misunderstood.
Congratulations, Paula!
Read the paper here: psycnet.apa.org
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