Empathic Model Research Articles

From Information Seeking to Social Support: Utilities of WhatsApp Group for Health Education and Postpartum Healing among CS Mothers in Nigeria

Previous studies on computer-mediated communication have investigated the use of WhatsApp groups for health education, health communication, and behavior change, but no empirical study had documented the experiences of Cesarean Section (CS) mothers on their use of WhatsApp groups for health education, information seeking and postpartum healing. This study identifies the post-CS goals of mothers who joined Csection Mum Community WhatsApp group, examines the extent to which the group’s activities satisfied those goals, investigates why they felt safe disclosing their personal health information in the group and explores the role of interpersonal empathic communication on their postpartum healing. Using Online Focus Group Discussion (OFGD) to collect data from twenty-seven CS mothers, and guided by some propositions of uses and gratifications, social penetration theories, and empathic model, the findings revealed that the WhatsApp group satisfied the mothers’ informational, educational, experiential learning and social support needs. Their affinity with the group’s activities influenced their spontaneous self-disclosure in the group. It was also found that interpersonal empathic communication improved the postpartum depression healing process of the mothers. It, therefore, recommends that hospitals (that operate on patients) empower adult mental health nurses or clinical psychiatrists to engage CS mothers and their caregivers (family members, spouses, etc.) in psycho-education, especially empathic communication, before discharging the mothers.

An Autonomous Cognitive Empathy Model Responsive to Users’ Facial Emotion Expressions

Successful social robot services depend on how robots can interact with users. The effective service can be obtained through smooth, engaged, and humanoid interactions in which robots react properly to a user’s affective state. This article proposes a novel Automatic Cognitive Empathy Model, ACEM, for humanoid robots to achieve longer and more engaged human-robot interactions (HRI) by considering humans’ emotions and replying to them appropriately. The proposed model continuously detects the affective states of a user based on facial expressions and generates desired, either parallel or reactive, empathic behaviors that are already adapted to the user’s personality. Users’ affective states are detected using a stacked autoencoder network that is trained and tested on the RAVDESS dataset. The overall proposed empathic model is verified throughout an experiment, where different emotions are triggered in participants and then empathic behaviors are applied based on proposed hypothesis. The results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed model in terms of related social and friendship concepts that participants perceived during interaction with the robot.

Gray for a Day: Exploring the Impact of a Sensory Aging Experience

Gray for a Day is an interactive educational curriculum that centers on use of an empathic model to improve knowledge, skills, and attitudes related to sensory and functional aging, empathy toward older adults, and one's own health behaviors. The program has been disseminated by Extension educators with varied audiences and evaluated with 2,440 respondents. Participants reported positive changes in knowledge, skills, attitudes, and intended behaviors. Cooperative Extension and community-based partners are uniquely positioned to use the curriculum to provide sensory experiences that can improve understanding of and empathy toward older adults.

Design Guidelines to Reduce Extrinsic Fall Risks in the Built Environment

As people age, environments supporting changing needs can potentially impact their quality of life. Aging often leads to a decrease in the ability of people to interpret sensory cues within their environment. Using Pastalan’s Empathic Model as a framework, a list of guidelines was established to address the extrinsic risk factors affecting falls within the built environment. Attention to these items may not prevent all falls but will mitigate some of the external risks that cause falls for older adults. It is the goal of the authors that these guidelines can be utilized as a design tool by families and design professionals for assessing sensory cues that can enhance aging adults’ ability to maneuver within the built environment. Enhanced knowledge in this area can serve to increase the safety, comfort, and ability of residents to maneuver the environment on their own.

User-centered empathy design: a prototype of school-age children learning aids system

School-age children receive external stimuli to understand the world and acquire various life skills through various learning behaviors. The process of children’s learning requires appropriate teaching methods, including children’s physical and mental status, special needs, and behavior, in order to provide learning aids, as appropriate, to help children acquire language, body movements, social skills, and other media, effectively take the user as the starting point to fit the needs of users, and observe binding and participatory designs to become a new research direction. In view of the rapid development of science and technology, the main purpose of this study is to explore a learning aids system suitable for school-age children, including the attributes, results, and elements to help children learn smoothly. It is difficult to understand the behavior and psychology of school-age children from traditional research methods, thus, the best way is to understand them is through interactions. Empathic design, which is the current research direction of the Design and Research Center, focuses on how designers propose design solutions based on the feelings experience, creativity, and understanding of users. This study is carried out according to the empathic design model, where the main procedure is Participant Observation to describe the behavioral phenomenon of school-age children, and Laddering interviews are applied to obtain qualitative data, conduct implication matrix analysis, and create a Streamlined Hierarchical Value Map according to the design guidelines and other steps to help designers and school-age children use the learning aids system to obtain a consensus, including system hardware and software development reference. The main research contribution is to respond to the needs of children in all aspects of life, put forward excellent learning aids system design guidelines, and then, help the learning development of children.

Long-term interactions with empathic social robots

We investigated the effects of an adaptive empathic model in repeated interactions between users and social robots. The proposed model includes an online learning decision-making mechanism that allows the robot to select the most appropriate supportive behaviors based on the impact that similar behaviors had in keeping the user in a positive affective state.

Empathic Robots for Long-term Interaction

As a great number of robotic products are entering people’s lives, the question of how can they behave in order to sustain long-term interactions with users becomes increasingly more relevant. In this paper, we present an empathic model for social robots that aim to interact with children for extended periods of time. The application of this model to a scenario where a social robot plays chess with children is described. To evaluate the proposed model, we conducted a long-term study in an elementary school and measured children’s perception of social presence, engagement and social support.

Breaking bad news: Patients’ preferences and health locus of control

ObjectiveTo identify patients’ preferences for models of communicating bad news and to explore how such preferences, and the reasons for the preferences, relate with personality characteristics, specifically patients’ health locus of control (HLC): internal/external and ‘powerful others’ (PO). MethodsSeventy-two patients from an oncology clinic watched videotaped scenarios of a breaking bad news moment, selected the model they preferred, filled an HLC scale and were interviewed about their choices. Data were analyzed with Chi-square, Kruskal–Wallis and Mann–Whitney tests. Interviews were content-analyzed. Results77.8% preferred an “empathic professional”, 12.5% a “distanced expert” and 9.7% an “emotionally burdened expert”. Preferences varied significantly with HLC scores (patients with higher internal locus of control (ILC) and lower PO preferred the empathic model), presence of cancer, age and education. Patients explained their preferences through aspects of Caring, Professionalism, Wording, Time and Hope. ILC registered significant differences in regards to Wording and Time, whereas PO was associated with Hope and Time. ConclusionsHLC is an important dimension that can help doctors to better know their patients. Practice implicationsKnowing whether patients attribute their health to their own behaviors or to chance/others can help tailor the disclosure of bad news to their specific preferences.

Extending the Empathic Communication Model of Burnout: Incorporating Individual Differences to Learn More about Workplace Emotion, Communicative Responsiveness, and Burnout

This field study contributes to the literature on emotional communication in the human-services industry. Specifically, this study extends the empathic communication model of burnout by incorporating individual differences to predict workplace emotion and communicative responsiveness. This extension has important implications for both research and knowledge on responsiveness, burnout, and workplace practices. A questionnaire filled out by 159 caregivers from a moderately sized human-services agency explored the role of self-monitoring and emotional intelligence in enhancing caregiver performance. Results indicate that those caregivers who can control their expressive behavior and manage their moods to maintain a sense of optimism are in a better position to respond emotionally and communicatively to distressed clients and resist job burnout.

The Empathic Model: A Methodological Bridge between Research and Design

The Empathic Model: A Methodological Bridge between Research and Design

The Empathic Model a Methodological Bridge between Research and Design

(1977). The Empathic Model a Methodological Bridge between Research and Design. Journal of Architectural Education: Vol. 31, Environments and Aging, pp. 14-15.