Trust, Anxiety, and Agency in the Age of AI: The Psychology of Human-AI Interaction

Artificial intelligence is no longer a passive tool. Across learning, work, and daily life, AI systems increasingly act as communication partners, content producers, and social interaction partners, and this shift is changing how people think, feel, and behave around them. Nowhere is this more visible than in education, where AI-powered tutoring systems, generative writing tools, and conversational agents are now embedded in everyday learning. Yet the psychological processes underlying these interactions, particularly trust, anxiety, and agency, remain far less understood than their instructional or technical effects.This Research Topic centers on the psychology of human-AI interaction, using trust, anxiety, and agency as its organizing framework, with education and learning environments as its anchor application context. It examines how learners and educators come to trust or distrust AI systems, how AI-related anxiety and technostress develop and can be mitigated, and how sustained exposure to AI-mediated environments shapes self-efficacy, motivation, and a sense of agency over one’s own learning and work.The collection also takes seriously that AI’s psychological footprint now extends beyond task assistance. As AI systems become more conversational, personalized, and emotionally responsive, they raise newer questions that sit naturally alongside the trust-anxiety-agency framework: anthropomorphism and emotional attachment to AI tools, the psychological ownership learners feel over AI-assisted work, questions of authenticity when content is AI-generated or AI-assisted, and how these dynamics play out in human-AI relationships more broadly. Anxiety is treated here as a defining construct in its own right, not folded into a general wellbeing frame, distinguishing this collection’s focus from adjacent work on AI ethics and human-robot interaction.While emotional responses to AI have been examined through a cognitive-mechanisms lens elsewhere in the journal, this Research Topic centers trust, anxiety, and agency as relational and identity-level constructs, such as anthropomorphism, psychological ownership, and authenticity, rather than as moderators of learning-outcome measures.Understanding these dynamics matters for three reasons. First, AI tools are becoming embedded in everyday learning and work faster than our understanding of their psychological effects on users. Second, emotional and cognitive responses to AI, whether trust, apprehension, attachment, or ambivalence, directly shape whether these tools support or undermine self-regulation, motivation, and wellbeing. Third, as AI systems take on more autonomous and relational roles, questions of agency, authenticity, and psychological ownership become urgent, particularly for populations historically underrepresented in STEM and other fields.This Research Topic invites empirical, theoretical, and review contributions examining the psychological processes underlying human engagement with AI, particularly in learning and educational contexts. We welcome work addressing:• AI-related anxiety and technostress, including antecedents, moderators, and intervention strategies• Trust formation and calibration in human-AI interaction, including in educational and learning technologies• Self-efficacy, self-regulated learning, and motivation as shaped by AI-mediated tools and environments• Perceived agency, belonging, and psychological ownership for learners and users navigating AI-integrated environments, with particular attention to underrepresented groups• Anthropomorphism and emotional attachment to AI systems, and their psychological consequences• Authenticity and identity in the context of AI-generated or AI-assisted content and synthetic media• Human-AI relationships as AI shifts from a tool to a communication partner, content producer, or social interaction partner• Ethical cognition and academic integrity as psychological (not purely policy) phenomena in AI-integrated learning• Cross-cultural and international comparative studies of AI-related trust, anxiety, and agencyWe particularly encourage cross-cultural and comparative studies, as this angle remains underexplored in the current literature on AI and psychology. Topic editors: De Chih Lee, Patcharin Panjaburee Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/85442/trust-anxiety-and-agency-in-the-age-of-ai-the-psychology-of-human-ai-interaction