skip to main content
research-article

The Language of Situational Empathy

Authors Info & Claims
Published:22 April 2021Publication History
Skip Abstract Section

Abstract

Empathy is the tendency to understand and share others' thoughts and feelings. Literature in psychology has shown through surveys potential beneficial implications of empathy. Prior psychology literature showed that a particular type of empathy called "situational empathy" --- an immediate empathic response to a triggering situation (e.g., a distressing situation) --- is reflected in the language people use in response to the situation. However, this has not so far been properly measured at scale. In this work, we collected 4k textual reactions (and corresponding situational empathy labels) to different stories. Driven by theoretical concepts, we developed computational models to predict situational empathy from text and, in so doing, we built and made available a list of empathy-related words. When applied to Reddit posts and movie transcripts, our models produced results that matched prior theoretical findings, offering evidence of external validity and suggesting its applicability to unstructured data. The capability of measuring proxies for empathy at scale might benefit a variety of areas such as social media, digital healthcare, and workplace well-being.

References

  1. Muhammad M Abdul-Mageed, Anneke Buffone, Hao Peng, Johannes Eichstaedt, and Lyle Ungar. 2017. Recognizing pathogenic empathy in social media. In Eleventh International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  2. Ritu Agarwal, Guodong Gao, Catherine DesRoches, and Ashish K Jha. 2010. Research commentary-The digital transformation of healthcare: Current status and the road ahead. Information Systems Research 21, 4 (2010), 796--809.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  3. Charles Daniel Batson. 2011. Altruism in humans. Oxford University Press, USA.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  4. Jason Baumgartner. 2015. I have every publicly available Reddit comment for research. 1.7 billion comments 250 GB compressed. Any interest in this? https://redd.it/3bxlg7Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  5. Natalya N Bazarova, Yoon Hyung Choi, Victoria Schwanda Sosik, Dan Cosley, and Janis Whitlock. 2015. Social sharing of emotions on Facebook: Channel differences, satisfaction, and replies. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM conference on computer supported cooperative work & social computing. 154--164.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  6. Giacomo Bono, Robert A Emmons, and Michael E McCullough. 2004. Gratitude in practice and the practice of gratitude. Positive psychology in practice (2004), 464--481.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  7. Sven Buechel, Anneke Buffone, Barry Slaff, Lyle Ungar, and Joao Sedoc. 2018. Modeling Empathy and Distress in Reaction to News Stories. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 4758--4765.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  8. Michael Buhrmester, Tracy Kwang, and Samuel D Gosling. 2016. Amazon's Mechanical Turk: A new source of inexpensive, yet high-quality data? (2016).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  9. Ronan Cummins, Michael P Ewbank, Alan Martin, Valentin Tablan, Ana Catarino, and Andrew D Blackwell. 2019. TIM: A Tool for Gaining Insights into Psychotherapy. In The World Wide Web Conference. ACM, 3503--3506.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  10. Thomas Davidson, Dana Warmsley, Michael Macy, and Ingmar Weber. 2017. Automated hate speech detection and the problem of offensive language. In Eleventh international aaai conference on web and social media.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  11. Mark H Davis. 1983. Measuring individual differences in empathy: Evidence for a multidimensional approach. Journal of personality and social psychology 44, 1 (1983), 113.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  12. Mark H Davis et al. 1980. A multidimensional approach to individual differences in empathy. (1980).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  13. Munmun De Choudhury and Sushovan De. 2014. Mental health discourse on reddit: Self-disclosure, social support, and anonymity. In Eighth international AAAI conference on weblogs and social media.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  14. Minet De Wied, Susan JT Branje, and Wim HJ Meeus. 2007. Empathy and conflict resolution in friendship relations among adolescents. Aggressive Behavior: Official Journal of the International Society for Research on Aggression 33, 1 (2007), 48--55.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  15. Jean Ed Decety and William Ed Ickes. 2009. The social neuroscience of empathy. MIT Press.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  16. Jacob Devlin, Ming-Wei Chang, Kenton Lee, and Kristina Toutanova. 2018. Bert: Pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding. arXiv preprint arXiv:1810.04805 (2018).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  17. Jennifer Edgar, Joe Murphy, and Michael Keating. 2016. Comparing traditional and crowdsourcing methods for pretesting survey questions. Sage Open 6, 4 (2016), 2158244016671770.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  18. Nancy Eisenberg and Randy Lennon. 1983. Sex differences in empathy and related capacities. Psychological bulletin 94, 1 (1983), 100.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  19. Robert Elliott, Arthur C Bohart, Jeanne C Watson, and Leslie S Greenberg. 2011. Empathy. Psychotherapy 48, 1 (2011), 43.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  20. Ethan Fast, Binbin Chen, and Michael S Bernstein. 2016. Empath: Understanding topic signals in large-scale text. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 4647--4657.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  21. Emilio Ferrara and Zeyao Yang. 2015. Measuring emotional contagion in social media. PloS one 10, 11 (2015), e0142390.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  22. Wendi L Gardner, Shira Gabriel, and Angela Y Lee. 1999. ?I" value freedom, but ?we" value relationships: Self-construal priming mirrors cultural differences in judgment. Psychological science 10, 4 (1999), 321--326.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  23. Justin Garten, Joe Hoover, Kate M Johnson, Reihane Boghrati, Carol Iskiwitch, and Morteza Dehghani. 2018. Dictionaries and distributions: Combining expert knowledge and large scale textual data content analysis. Behavior research methods 50, 1 (2018), 344--361.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  24. Andrew Gelman. 2008. Scaling regression inputs by dividing by two standard deviations. Statistics in medicine 27, 15 (2008), 2865--2873.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  25. James Gibson, Nikolaos Malandrakis, Francisco Romero, David C Atkins, and Shrikanth S Narayanan. 2015. Predicting therapist empathy in motivational interviews using language features inspired by psycholinguistic norms. In Sixteenth Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  26. Shihui Han and Glyn Humphreys. 2016. Self-construal: A cultural framework for brain function. Current Opinion in Psychology 8 (2016), 10--14.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  27. Martin L Hoffman. 2001. Empathy and moral development: Implications for caring and justice. Cambridge University Press.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  28. Pei-Yun Hsueh, Prem Melville, and Vikas Sindhwani. 2009. Data quality from crowdsourcing: a study of annotation selection criteria. In Proceedings of the NAACL HLT 2009 workshop on active learning for natural language processing. 27--35.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  29. Isabell Hühnel, Mara Fölster, Katja Werheid, and Ursula Hess. 2014. Empathic reactions of younger and older adults: No age related decline in affective responding. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 50 (2014), 136--143.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  30. Clayton J Hutto and Eric Gilbert. 2014. Vader: A parsimonious rule-based model for sentiment analysis of social media text. In Eighth international AAAI conference on weblogs and social media.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  31. William Ickes, Paul R Gesn, and Tiffany Graham. 2000. Gender differences in empathic accuracy: Differential ability or differential motivation? Personal Relationships 7, 1 (2000), 95--109.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  32. Nicole Kämpfe, Jan Penzhorn, Julia Schikora, Julia Dünzl, and Jane Schneidenbach. 2009. Empathy and social desirability: a comparison of delinquent and non-delinquent participants using direct and indirect measures. Psychology, Crime & Law 15, 1 (2009), 1--17.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  33. Marsha Kinder. 1991. Playing with power in movies, television, and video games: from Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Univ of California Press.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  34. Kristi JK Klein and Sara D Hodges. 2001. Gender differences, motivation, and empathic accuracy: When it pays to understand. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 27, 6 (2001), 720--730.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  35. Sara Konrath. 2013. The empathy paradox: Increasing disconnection in the age of increasing connection. In Handbook of research on technoself: Identity in a technological society. IGI Global, 204--228.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  36. Sara Konrath, Brian P Meier, and Brad J Bushman. 2018. Development and validation of the single item trait empathy scale (SITES). Journal of research in personality 73 (2018), 111--122.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  37. Michal Kosinski, David Stillwell, and Thore Graepel. 2013. Private traits and attributes are predictable from digital records of human behavior. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110, 15 (2013), 5802--5805.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  38. Shiro Kumano, Kazuhiro Otsuka, Dan Mikami, and Junji Yamato. 2011. Analyzing empathetic interactions based on the probabilistic modeling of the co-occurrence patterns of facial expressions in group meetings. In Face and Gesture 2011. IEEE, 43--50.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  39. Serena Lecce, Irene Ceccato, Federica Bianco, Alessia Rosi, Sara Bottiroli, and Elena Cavallini. 2017. Theory of Mind and social relationships in older adults: the role of social motivation. Aging & Mental Health 21, 3 (2017), 253--258.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  40. Marina Litvak, Jahna Otterbacher, Chee Siang Ang, and David Atkins. 2016. Social and linguistic behavior and its correlation to trait empathy. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Modeling of People's Opinions, Personality, and Emotions in Social Media (PEOPLES). 128--137.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  41. Sarah Peregrine Lord, Elisa Sheng, Zac E Imel, John Baer, and David C Atkins. 2015. More than reflections: empathy in motivational interviewing includes language style synchrony between therapist and client. Behavior therapy 46, 3 (2015), 296--303.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  42. Christine Ma-Kellams and Jim Blascovich. 2012. Inferring the emotions of friends versus strangers: The role of culture and self-construal. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 38, 7 (2012), 933--945.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  43. Yishay Mansour, Mehryar Mohri, and Afshin Rostamizadeh. 2009. Domain adaptation with multiple sources. In Advances in neural information processing systems. 1041--1048.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  44. Gretchen McAllister and Jacqueline Jordan Irvine. 2002. The role of empathy in teaching culturally diverse students: A qualitative study of teachers? beliefs. Journal of teacher education 53, 5 (2002), 433--443.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  45. Alexey N Medvedev, Renaud Lambiotte, and Jean-Charles Delvenne. 2017. The anatomy of Reddit: An overview of academic research. In Dynamics on and of Complex Networks. Springer, 183--204.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  46. Yelena Mejova, Amy X Zhang, Nicholas Diakopoulos, and Carlos Castillo. 2014. Controversy and sentiment in online news. arXiv preprint arXiv:1409.8152 (2014).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  47. Saif M Mohammad and Peter D Turney. 2013. Crowdsourcing a word--emotion association lexicon. Computational Intelligence 29, 3 (2013), 436--465.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  48. Sylvia A Morelli, Desmond C Ong, Rucha Makati, Matthew O Jackson, and Jamil Zaki. 2017. Empathy and well-being correlate with centrality in different social networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114, 37 (2017), 9843--9847.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  49. Ed O'brien, Sara H Konrath, Daniel Grühn, and Anna Linda Hagen. 2012. Empathic concern and perspective taking: Linear and quadratic effects of age across the adult life span. Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences 68, 2 (2012), 168--175.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  50. Jahna Otterbacher, Chee Siang Ang, Marina Litvak, and David Atkins. 2017. Show me you care: Trait empathy, linguistic style, and mimicry on Facebook. ACM Transactions on Internet Technology (TOIT) 17, 1 (2017), 6.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  51. Ed O'Brien, Sara H Konrath, Daniel Grühn, and Anna Linda Hagen. 2013. Empathic concern and perspective taking: Linear and quadratic effects of age across the adult life span. Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences 68, 2 (2013), 168--175.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  52. Kyung Hye Park, Dong-hee Kim, Seok Kyoung Kim, Young Hoon Yi, Jae Hoon Jeong, Jiun Chae, Jiyeon Hwang, and HyeRin Roh. 2015. The relationships between empathy, stress and social support among medical students. International journal of medical education 6 (2015), 103.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  53. James W Pennebaker, Cindy K Chung, Joey Frazee, Gary M Lavergne, and David I Beaver. 2014. When small words foretell academic success: The case of college admissions essays. PloS one 9, 12 (2014), e115844.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  54. James W Pennebaker, Martha E Francis, and Roger J Booth. 2001. Linguistic inquiry and word count: LIWC 2001. Mahway: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates 71, 2001 (2001), 2001.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  55. Jeffrey Pennington, Richard Socher, and Christopher Manning. 2014. Glove: Global vectors for word representation. In Proceedings of the 2014 conference on empirical methods in natural language processing (EMNLP). 1532--1543.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  56. Daniella Perry, Talma Hendler, and Simone G Shamay-Tsoory. 2011. Can we share the joy of others? Empathic neural responses to distress vs joy. Social cognitive and affective neuroscience 7, 8 (2011), 909--916.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  57. Marco Polignano, Pierpaolo Basile, Gaetano Rossiello, Marco de Gemmis, and Giovanni Semeraro. 2017. Learning inclination to empathy from social media footprints. In Proceedings of the 25th Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization. ACM, 383--384.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  58. Stephanie D Preston and Frans BM De Waal. 2002. Empathy: Its ultimate and proximate bases. Behavioral and brain sciences 25, 1 (2002), 1--20.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  59. Alexander Robertson, Luca Maria Aiello, and Daniele Quercia. 2019. The Language of Dialogue Is Complex. In Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, Vol. 13. 428--439.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  60. Michelle Rodino-Colocino. 2018. Me too,# MeToo: Countering cruelty with empathy. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, 1 (2018), 96--100.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  61. Scott Schieman and Karen Van Gundy. 2000. The personal and social links between age and self-reported empathy. Social Psychology Quarterly (2000), 152--174.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  62. Natalie Sest and Evita March. 2017. Constructing the cyber-troll: Psychopathy, sadism, and empathy. Personality and Individual Differences 119 (2017), 69--72.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  63. Yla R Tausczik and James W Pennebaker. 2010. The psychological meaning of words: LIWC and computerized text analysis methods. Journal of language and social psychology 29, 1 (2010), 24--54.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  64. Mohsen Tavakol and Reg Dennick. 2011. Making sense of Cronbach's alpha. International journal of medical education 2 (2011), 53.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  65. Ashton D Trice and Hunter W Greer. 2019. The Psychology of Moviegoing: Choosing, Viewing and Being Influenced by Films. McFarland.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  66. Linus Vanlaere, Trees Coucke, and Chris Gastmans. 2010. Experiential learning of empathy in a care-ethics lab. Nursing Ethics 17, 3 (2010), 325--336.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  67. Barbara J Wilson. 2008. Media and children's aggression, fear, and altruism. The future of children 18, 1 (2008), 87--118.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  68. Karl-Andrew Woltin, Vincent Y Yzerbyt, and Olivier Corneille. 2011. On reducing an empathy gap: The impact of self-construal and order of judgment. British Journal of Social Psychology 50, 3 (2011), 553--562.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  69. Bo Xiao, Daniel Bone, Maarten Van Segbroeck, Zac E Imel, David C Atkins, Panayiotis G Georgiou, and Shrikanth S Narayanan. 2014. Modeling therapist empathy through prosody in drug addiction counseling. In Fifteenth Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  70. Bo Xiao, Dogan Can, Panayiotis G Georgiou, David Atkins, and Shrikanth S Narayanan. 2012. Analyzing the language of therapist empathy in motivational interview based psychotherapy. In Proceedings of The 2012 Asia Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association Annual Summit and Conference. IEEE, 1--4.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  71. Bo Xiao, Zac E Imel, Panayiotis Georgiou, David C Atkins, and Shrikanth S Narayanan. 2016. Computational analysis and simulation of empathic behaviors: A survey of empathy modeling with behavioral signal processing framework. Current psychiatry reports 18, 5 (2016), 49.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  72. Diyi Yang, Zheng Yao, Joseph Seering, and Robert Kraut. 2019. The channel matters: Self-disclosure, reciprocity and social support in online cancer support groups. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 1--15.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  73. Qing Zhou, Carlos Valiente, and Nancy Eisenberg. 2003. Empathy and its measurement. (2003).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar

Index Terms

  1. The Language of Situational Empathy

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Login options

    Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

    Sign in

    Full Access

    • Published in

      cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
      Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction  Volume 5, Issue CSCW1
      CSCW
      April 2021
      5016 pages
      EISSN:2573-0142
      DOI:10.1145/3460939
      Issue’s Table of Contents

      Copyright © 2021 ACM

      Publisher

      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      • Published: 22 April 2021
      Published in pacmhci Volume 5, Issue CSCW1

      Permissions

      Request permissions about this article.

      Request Permissions

      Check for updates

      Qualifiers

      • research-article

    PDF Format

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader
    About Cookies On This Site

    We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website.

    Learn more

    Got it!