ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Digit. Health
Sec. Digital Mental Health
Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fdgth.2025.1618169
This article is part of the Research TopicReimagining roles and identity in the era of human - AI collaborationView all articles
Ethical Dilemmas and the Reconstruction of Subjectivity in Digital Mourning in the Age of AI: An Empirical Study on the Acceptance Intentions of Bereaved Family Members of Cancer Patients
Provisionally accepted
- 1Beijing Normal-Hong Kong Baptist University, Zhuhai, China
- 2Chengdu Neusoft University, Chengdu, Sichuan, China
- 3Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, Henan Province, China
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With the rapid development of AI replication, virtual memorials, and emotional interaction technologies, digital mourning has increasingly become a common form of psychological reconstruction following the death of patients with severe illnesses. However, for family members of cancer patients-who often endure prolonged caregiving responsibilities and ethical decision-making stress-this process is also accompanied by complex ethical dilemmas and intense grief perception.Drawing on the UTAUT model, and integrating Foucauldian subjectivation theory with emotionalcognitive frameworks, this study constructs an extended path model to explore how ethical identification and grief perception influence the acceptance intentions of AI-based digital mourning technologies. Based on 129 valid questionnaire responses and analyzed using PLS-SEM, the results reveal that performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, and ethical concern all significantly predict users' willingness to adopt, while grief perception affects both intention and actual behavior. The findings suggest that the acceptance of digital mourning is not solely a matter of technological rationality, but is deeply embedded in the tension between emotional trauma and moral conflict. This research advances our understanding of the ethical and psychological dimensions of death-related technologies in the AI era and offers both theoretical grounding and practical insight for future human-AI interaction, digital commemoration systems, and end-of-life technology governance.
Keywords: AI digital mourning, UTAUT model, Ethical Concerns in AI, Perception of grief, Emprical study
Received: 06 May 2025; Accepted: 17 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 FU, Ye, Wang, Liu, Wu and Yuan. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Kun FU, Beijing Normal-Hong Kong Baptist University, Zhuhai, China
Yuan Yuan, Beijing Normal-Hong Kong Baptist University, Zhuhai, China
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