Examining Cognitive Empathy Elements within AI Chatbots for Healthcare Systems

Abstract

Empathy is an essential part of communication in healthcare. It is a multidimensional concept and the two key dimensions: emotional and cognitive empathy allow clinicians to understand a patient’s situation, reasoning, and feelings clearly (Mercer and Reynolds, 2002). As artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly being used in healthcare for many routine tasks, accurate diagnoses, and complex treatment plans, it is becoming more crucial to incorporate clinical empathy into patient-faced AI systems. Unless patients perceive that the AI is understanding their situation, the communication between patient and AI may not sustain efficiently. AI may not really exhibit any emotional empathy at present, but it has the capability to exhibit cognitive empathy by communicating how it can understand patients’ reasoning, perspectives, and point of view. In my dissertation, I examine this issue across three separate lab experiments and one interview study. At first, I developed AI Cognitive Empathy Scale (AICES) and tested all empathy (emotional and cognitive) components together in a simulated scenario against control for patient-AI interaction for diagnosis purposes. In the second experiment, I tested the empathy components separately against control in different simulated scenarios. I identified six cognitive empathy elements from the interview study with first-time mothers, two of these elements were unique from the past literature. In the final lab experiment, I tested different cognitive empathy components separately based on the results from the interview study in simulated scenarios to examine which element emerges as the most effective. Finally, I developed a conceptual model of cognitive empathy for patient-AI interaction connecting the past literature and the observations from my studies. Overall, cognitive empathy elements show promise to create a shared understanding in patients-AI communication that may lead to increased patient satisfaction and willingness to use AI systems for initial diagnosis purposes.