Abstract
General-purpose conversational AI chatbots and AI companions increasingly offer adolescents emotionally supportive conversations, raising questions about how conversational profile shapes immediate social perceptions and preferences. In a preregistered online experiment with 284 adolescent–parent dyads, youth aged 11-15 and their parents read two closely matched transcripts in which a chatbot responded to the same everyday social problem using either a relational conversational profile (affiliative and commitment language) or a transparent conversational profile (AI-identity disclosure and boundary-setting language). Adolescents rated the relational profile higher on all five perceptions: anthropomorphism, emotional closeness, likability, perceived helpfulness, and trust. In paired dyadic comparisons, adolescents selected the relational profile more often than their own parent did and selected the transparent profile less often. Adolescents who selected the relational profile reported lower family relationship quality and higher perceived stress and anxiety symptoms than those who selected the transparent profile. These findings suggest that the relational conversational profile is associated with greater anthropomorphism, trust, and emotional closeness and may be especially appealing to adolescents reporting lower-quality offline relationships and greater emotional distress, highlighting the relevance of AI conversational profiles to how young people perceive and prefer AI chatbots.
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