Frequency of Usage of Conversational AI Support and its Relations with Emotion Regulation Strategies: A Gender-based Comparative Study among Boys and Girls

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20488978

Mitali Sen (Department of Psychology, St. Wilfred PG College, Jaipur, Rajasthan)

AI chatbots are rapidly integrating into the daily routines of young individuals, serving purposes such as information retrieval, academic assistance, and emotional support. So, our study aims to determine how the frequency of AI chatbot usage is related to two emotion regulation styles: cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression, and whether these patterns differ across males and females. Participants were 72 young Indian adults (36 boys & 36 girls) aged 18 to 30. We collected data using a self-constructed questionnaire to find AI chatbot usage frequency and standardized Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ-30; Preece & Gross, 2026). Pearson’s correlation results reveal no association between AI usage frequency and cognitive reappraisal (r = -0.048; p = 0.691) and no correlation with expressive suppression (r = 0.001; p= 0.995). The T-test results indicate that there was no significant difference in the frequency of AI usage between males (M=3.36, SD=0.833) and females (M=3.19, SD=0.786), t = 0.873, p = 0.193. The analysis also showed that there is no significant difference in use of cognitive reappraisal, with males (M = 14.83, SD = 4.025) and females (M = 15.19, SD = 4.275) reporting similar levels, t = -0.369, p = 0.357. However, analysis reveals a significant gender difference in use of expressive suppression, t = 1.766, p = 0.041, between males (M = 15.17, SD = 3.692) and females (M = 13.42, SD = 4.662). The findings show that males and females use AI and cognitive reappraisal at similar levels, and males use expressive suppression more than females. Results also show that AI usage is associated with lower cognitive reappraisal and higher expressive suppression.