Empathic Dialogue Research Articles

An effective emotion tendency perception model in empathic dialogue.

The effectiveness of open-domain dialogue systems depends heavily on emotion. In dialogue systems, previous models primarily detected emotions by looking for emotional words embedded in sentences. However, they did not precisely quantify the association of all words with emotions, which has led to a certain bias. To overcome this issue, we propose an emotion tendency perception model. The model uses an emotion encoder to accurately quantify the emotional tendencies of all words. Meanwhile, it uses a shared fusion decoder to equip the decoder with the sentiment and semantic capabilities of the encoder. We conducted extensive evaluations on Empathetic Dialogue. Experimental results demonstrate its efficacy. Compared with the state of the art, our approach has distinctive advantages.

The Caregiving Journey: Arts-Based Methods as Tools for Participatory Co-Design of Health Technologies

Being an informal caregiver to a loved one with an illness, disease, or chronic disability is a rewarding but frequently stressful experience. In this design research project, caregivers participated in a half-day workshop to (1) share their caregiving experience, (2) reflect on the potential of a mobile smartphone ‘app’ for carers and (3) co-design this app, as well as in-depth interviews. Our design research process used multiple arts-based methods, including visual experience mapping tools, storytelling, photo-elicitation, documentary photography, cartoons, drawing, and research poetry, to provide rich and empathic insight into daily life as a caregiver and illuminate the potential of technology. Workshop activities included creating a visual collage of lived experience, annotated visual maps illustrating the reality and misconceptions of caregiving, pathways of care, and mapping a day in their life using the visual metaphor of a clock. Carers then trialled and provided feedback on a prototype app, creating a collective map of desired features. This co-design feedback informed the final app design, which was formally launched at a public exhibition showcasing stories collected from our arts and design-led processes. This paper outlines the value of arts and design methods in the design of future health technologies, which provide a critical space for an informed, reflexive, and empathic dialogue about illness and caregiving, resulting in designs that truly met consumer’s needs.

Popularity of Mental Health Chatbots Grows

Popularity of Mental Health Chatbots Grows

Analysis of Empathic Dialogue in Actual Doctor-Patient Calls and Implications for Design of Embodied Conversational Agents

Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) are virtual agents that exhibit humanlike verbal and non-verbal behaviours. When it comes to eHealth, ECAs can provide vital support to patients by being more reachable. In order to make ECAs more effective, humanlike empathy expressed during conversation through relational cues is essential. Empathy revolves around a wide range of verbal and non-verbal behaviours that include, for example, the choice of words in social dialogues. Owing to the COVID-19 situation, there was an opportunity to record online consultations in the Incontinence Clinic and Sleep Clinic at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead in Sydney, Australia. The present study analysed these human dialogues using qualitative research methods to understand the role of empathic dialogue used by the medical team. The qualitative analysis of the live calls used psychology-based relational cues derived from conversational characteristics of humans to build a coding framework around the most relevant themes. Statistical analysis was used to compare relational cue usage between healthcare roles. Finally, using the framework dialogues of the medical team and two ECAs known as Dr Evie (eVirtual Agent for Incontinence and Enuresis) and SAM (Sleep Adherence Mentor) were compared to provide recommendations for health practitioners and future ECA dialogue development.

Broadcasting change: in empathic dialogue with Duffy and Jennings's graphic novel adaptation of Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower

Broadcasting change: in empathic dialogue with Duffy and Jennings's graphic novel adaptation of Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower

Adapting a Virtual Advisor’s Verbal Conversation Based on Predicted User Preferences: A Study of Neutral, Empathic and Tailored Dialogue

Virtual agents that improve the lives of humans need to be more than user-aware and adaptive to the user’s current state and behavior. Additionally, they need to apply expertise gained from experience that drives their adaptive behavior based on deep understanding of the user’s features (such as gender, culture, personality, and psychological state). Our work has involved extension of FAtiMA (Fearnot AffecTive Mind Architecture) with the addition of an Adaptive Engine to the FAtiMA cognitive agent architecture. We use machine learning to acquire the agent’s expertise by capturing a collection of user profiles into a user model and development of agent expertise based on the user model. In this paper, we describe a study to evaluate the Adaptive Engine, which compares the benefit (i.e., reduced stress, increased rapport) of tailoring dialogue to the specific user (Adaptive group) with dialogues that are either empathic (Empathic group) or neutral (Neutral group). Results showed a significant reduction in stress in the empathic and neutral groups, but not the adaptive group. Analyses of rule accuracy, participants’ dialogue preferences, and individual differences reveal that the three groups had different needs for empathic dialogue and highlight the importance and challenges of getting the tailoring right.

Bodies and subjectivities: women in Cuban Paralympic sports (Cuerpos y subjetividades: mujeres en el deporte paralímpico cubano)

The singularity of the other, based on González Rey’s subjectivity, opens up the possibility in Sports Psychology of exploring the topic of the female body configured within the subjective experience of participating in Paralympic high-performance sports. In this way, we can consider sports and body practices to be spaces of transgression, where subjectively produced sports experience translates into a form of affirmation of female participation. Using the constructive-interpretative method, the case study of an outstanding Cuban Paralympic high-performance female athlete facilitated the construction of alternative ways of producing knowledge based on singularity and empathic dialogue. The sport is built as a multidimensional field, which has continued to be a spectacle, where the reproduction of an aesthetic and behavioural pattern on the concept of ‘what a woman should be’ – beyond an aesthetically shaped body based on normality – has also been reinforced. The research carried out has allowed us to reflect on reinterpretation processes of the sports experience where the productions of the order of subjectivity are brought to life.

Creating Social Interaction by Empathic Dialogue with Others Mediated by Artistic Acts

Creating Social Interaction by Empathic Dialogue with Others Mediated by Artistic Acts

Dialogue in critical times

In current discourse, the modern is generally associated with economic growth and technical efficiency (the latter to correct ecological excesses) - in short, with economics-as-usual. The postmodern is more associated with criticism of economics-as-usual. There is a great need at present for an empathic dialogue between economic traditionalists and those believing that a profound 'ecological turn' is needed.

Gay Seouls: Expanding Religious Spaces for Non-Heterosexuals in South Korea

ABSTRACTWhat Protestant congregations offer spaces for worship and dialogue among persons with different sexual orientations? The academic literature finds or assumes that non-heterosexuals are stigmatized or invisible in theologically conservative congregations and are welcomed in progressive, affirming congregations. This article develops an alternative claim that some conservative or evangelical congregations offer attractive spaces for non-heterosexuals to worship and dialogue. We illustrate with an exploratory study of four congregations in South Korea—two theologically progressive, two evangelical—whose pastors welcomed everybody regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity. The “inclusive-evangelical” congregations retained conservative theology on sexuality (sexual relations only within heterosexual marriage) but offered more empathic dialogue with non-heterosexuals than did most evangelical congregations; they also provided more resources, conventional religious culture, and ties to traditional affective networks than the affirming-progressive congregations. Inclusive-evangelical congregations offer an institutional venue for non-heterosexual Christians in Korea to potentially reconcile three central values: conservative Christianity, traditional (Confucian) affective networks, and expressive individualism.

Venturing into the uncanny valley of mind—The influence of mind attribution on the acceptance of human-like characters in a virtual reality setting

For more than 40years, the uncanny valley model has captivated researchers from various fields of expertise. Still, explanations as to why slightly imperfect human-like characters can evoke feelings of eeriness remain the subject of controversy. Many experiments exploring the phenomenon have emphasized specific visual factors in connection to evolutionary psychological theories or an underlying categorization conflict. More recently, studies have also shifted away focus from the appearance of human-like entities, instead exploring their mental capabilities as basis for observers' discomfort. In order to advance this perspective, we introduced 92 participants to a virtual reality (VR) chat program and presented them with two digital characters engaged in an emotional and empathic dialogue. Using the same pre-recorded 3D scene, we manipulated the perceived control type of the depicted characters (human-controlled avatars vs. computer-controlled agents), as well as their alleged level of autonomy (scripted vs. self-directed actions). Statistical analyses revealed that participants experienced significantly stronger eeriness if they perceived the empathic characters to be autonomous artificial intelligences. As human likeness and attractiveness ratings did not result in significant group differences, we present our results as evidence for an “uncanny valley of mind“ that relies on the attribution of emotions and social cognition to non-human entities. A possible relationship to the philosophy of anthropocentrism and its “threat to human distinctiveness” concept is discussed.

Development of a novel empathy-related video-feedback intervention to improve empathic accuracy of nursing students: A pilot study

BackgroundStressed family carers engage in health-risk behaviours that can lead to chronic illness. Innovative strategies are required to bolster empathic dialogue skills that impact nursing student confidence and sensitivity in meeting carers' wellness needs. PurposeTo report on the development and evaluation of a promising empathy-related video-feedback intervention and its impact on student empathic accuracy on carer health risk behaviours. DesignA pilot quasi-experimental design study with eight pairs of 3rd year undergraduate nursing students and carers. MethodsStudents participated in perspective-taking instructional and practice sessions, and a 10-minute video-recorded dialogue with carers followed by a video-tagging task. Quantitative and qualitative approaches helped us to evaluate the recruitment protocol, capture participant responses to the intervention and study tools, and develop a tool to assess student empathic accuracy. Main ResultsThe instructional and practice sessions increased student self-awareness of biases and interest in learning empathy by video-tagging feedback. Carers felt that students were ‘non-judgmental’, inquisitive, and helped them to ‘gain new insights’ that fostered ownership to change their health-risk behaviour. There was substantial Fleiss Kappa agreement among four raters across five dyads and 67 tagged instances. ConclusionIn general, students and carers evaluated the intervention favourably. The results suggest areas of improvement to the recruitment protocol, perspective-taking instructions, video-tagging task, and empathic accuracy tool.

L’auto-empathie, ou le devenir de l’autrui-en-soi : définition et clinique du virtuel

ObjectivesThe authors propose to explore a psychic phenomenon, the “auto-empathy”, as implemented in the context of digital spaces and particularly in the situation of the player who embodies an avatar (a pixel figure) in a video game. MethodFrom the perspective of a theoretical opening both phenomenological and psychoanalytic, auto-empathy is the process in which, taking the position of the “other-in-oneself”, we represent our subjective world – or the all states of our subjectivity (actions, emotions, thoughts) – by an empathic relationship with ourselves. The auto-empathy relationship is a process of distancing, and symbolic appropriation, in which we are divided into halves, implementing our innate ability to be both subject and object for ourselves. ResultsThe mediatization of auto-empathy in digital worlds can put ourselves instead of a figure that represents us – our avatar – so that our empathy is turned towards ourselves indirectly. This second time of empathy for a virtual figure of the self, called “mediatized auto-empathy” or “virtual auto-empathy”, would contribute thirdly to the development of empathy for oneself. Finally, the development of empathy for others would be supported in a fourth time, by the attention the players are paying to each other in network games. DiscussionThese four hypotheses, illustrated by clinical cases, open an interrogation concerning the frame of the psychoanalytical work. In the adolescent, the work of virtualisation, which consists in the creative anticipation of its subjective possibilities, seems regularly impeded. The mental duplicity is no longer in a position to operate a symbolizing distance between the real self and the virtual self, between the subjective self and the subjectivising self. The other-in-oneself is ineffective in proposing to the adolescent an empathic dialogue with oneself. Consequently, the autorepresentation flirts with the seizure, in particular in the subjective states of breaks. Nevertheless, the digital spaces could be indirect media of appropriation of subjective experiences for the teenager. ConclusionOur reflections led us to think of auto-empathy as the realization of the other-in-oneself which allows us to represent our own subjective world. The auto-empathy mediatized by an avatar can thus be described as a representation by empathy of our subjective part that contains this character. From then on, the space of the video game appears as a space of subjectivation.

Política afirmativa racial: polêmicas e processos de identidade do cotista universitário

Trata-se de um estudo de caso cujo objetivo foi investigar a afetividade intergrupal com base na implantação de política afirmativa para o ingresso de negros nas universidades públicas. O enfoque teórico foi o da Socionomia e o contexto foi a Universidade de Brasília. Os sujeitos foram 5 estudantes e 5 integrantes de uma ong. Os instrumentos foram um sociodrama e entrevistas semi-estruturadas. A autocobrança para excelente desempenho acadêmico, por parte dos cotistas e do estudante negro, foi uma das atitudes mais presentes, na busca de saída para a discriminação vivida ou sentida no processo inclusivo. A dinâmica afetiva dos estudantes universalistas foi a indiferença e o descaso ou desqualificação em relação às causas raciais. Concluímos que um projeto de inclusão racial efetiva depende de uma intervenção psicossocial multidisciplinar voltada para as redes sociométricas visando à flexibilização da identidade, o diálogo empático, a solidariedade entre os estudantes.

Encountering the Sacred in Psychotherapy: How to Talk With People About Their Spiritual Lives

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Book ReviewsFull AccessEncountering the Sacred in Psychotherapy: How to Talk With People About Their Spiritual LivesRoger D. Fallot, Ph.D.Roger D. FallotSearch for more papers by this author, Ph.D.Published Online:1 Sep 2002https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ps.53.9.1187AboutSectionsView EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail Spirituality has become a hot topic in recent years, even in the historically skeptical arena of mental health practice. James L. Griffith and Melissa Elliott Griffith have written a thoughtful, balanced, and often creative work describing not only how to talk about spirituality but also, perhaps more importantly, how to think about and listen to the spiritual dimension of people's lives.Drawing on a wide range of case studies, clustered mostly in psychiatric consultations and in individual and family psychotherapy, they outline a conceptually and technically eclectic approach to spiritual and religious experiences. Unlike works based in the literature of the psychology of religion or of spirituality and health, this book draws on narrative and solution-oriented models within a framework informed by cultural anthropology and postmodern philosophy. While the authors are not apologists for a specific religion or for religion in general, they are acutely attuned to the possibilities for human life that are uniquely expressed in the spiritual realm. Their goals are to describe helpful modes of engagement with people in exploring spirituality and to offer corresponding guidelines for therapists.Throughout the book, the authors recommend addressing spiritual issues from a stance of curiosity, attentive listening, and gentle responsiveness. They do not urge the adoption of a unique set of interventions related to spirituality. Rather, they seek to foster openness to the possibility of change through collaborative and empathic dialogue about clients' spiritual lives. Notably, the authors avoid premature judgments about the meaning and implications of spiritual or religious language in therapy. The detailed conversations they report offer models for how to listen carefully, to question sensitively, and to respond helpfully even when the therapist's knowledge of a client's religious or spiritual background is minimal.The book is organized around genres of spiritual expression that the authors have found most relevant in therapy—metaphor, narrative, conversation, rituals and practices, and community, among others. In each chapter, they examine a particular genre, present case studies illustrating its potential importance in therapy, and discuss change processes related to that mode of spiritual expression. Especially valuable are pragmatic sets of questions the authors pose. Some invite the therapist to think more clearly about the place or function of spirituality in a client's life; others invite the client to do the same. The conceptual material about the various genres is in many places less focused and compelling than the clinical conversations, and it is sometimes difficult to make connections between the many theoretical constructs and their therapeutic expressions. Yet the authors' carefully probing voices are clear throughout, emphasizing the primacy of shared understanding in therapy relationships.The authors clearly acknowledge many ways that spirituality and religion may become destructive, at both individual and systemic levels. But their emphasis on spirituality's capacity to sustain such values as hope, joy, community, and gratitude in the midst of their polar opposites is a reminder of why spirituality is often so central to the experience of people suffering with mental or physical illnesses and why therapists do well to take seriously spirituality's importance.Dr. Fallot is codirector of Community Connections in Washington, D.C., and an adjunct faculty member in pastoral counseling at Loyola College in Maryland in Baltimore.by James L. Griffith and Melissa Elliott Griffith; New York, Guilford Press, 2002, 320 pages, $35 FiguresReferencesCited byDetailsCited ByNone Volume 53Issue 9 September 2002Pages 1187-1188 Metrics History Published online 1 September 2002 Published in print 1 September 2002

Children of the Stones: Art Therapy Interventions in the West Bank

This article reports on art therapy interventions with children, families, and mental health workers, who were experiencing Post Traumatic Stress Disorder syndrome as a result of the military conflicts in the West Bank and Gaza. Through references to mental health literature regarding art therapy with individuals in war zones, the psychological effects of war and violence on children and their families are identified. The author describes art therapy in six mental health clinics. The artwork from participants in group workshops helped to open lines of communication among people enduring attempts at reconstruction and rehabilitation of their society. The article ends by describing follow-up plans to promote empathic dialogue among mental health workers in the different cultures.

Humanistic psychology and religion: Steps toward reconciliation

Disagreements have surfaced recently among rank- and-file mental health practitioners regarding the relationship between psychology and religion. To mediate these differences and misunderstandings, a study is presented here of the basic concepts of humanistic psychology vis-á-vis major elements of Judeo-Christian biblical theology. An assumption is posited that all forms of knowledge share a fundamental language basis and symbolic system regarding the ultimate questions and meanings of existence. From this presupposition similarities and congruities among specific elements of humanistic psychology and biblical theology are discussed, providing a basis for more intensive empathic dialogue and cooperative research. A bridge is established to enable therapists to understand better their clients' religious conflicts and/or emotional stresses caused by religious factors.