arXiv:2607. 15282v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Empathy is most often theorized as resonance: a mirroring of another's present emotional or cognitive state.
arXiv:2609.15654v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Activation steering has been used to control traits such as honesty, refusal, and sycophancy, yet supportive empathy is evaluated along multiple dimens...
The paper introduces FIGS, a dual‑axis evaluation framework for multi‑turn sycophancy that avoids penalizing empathy. It uses a 10‑turn conversational simulator with 500 diverse scenarios to test whether models stay truthful while keeping praise proportional, and whether they show calibrated validation of user feelings. The study finds that current models either drift toward sycophancy or become overly detached, highlighting an unresolved trade‑off in sustained dialogue.
arXiv:2608.21925v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Emotional Support Conversation (ESC) systems aim to provide holistic support by balancing professional therapeutic competence with natural empathy. How...
The study examines whether a decodable "empathy" direction can be used as a reliable causal lever in language models. Using EPITOME-derived facets of Recognition (cognitive) and Resonance (affective) across three instruction‑tuned LLMs, the authors find that while affective steering can partially raise affective scores, cognitive steering shows inconsistent or unmeasurable effects. The results highlight that decodability does not guarantee reliable control, especially for cognitive empathy, and that measurement sensitivity must be explicitly checked.
arXiv:2609.15089v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Empathetic response generation in spoken dialogue systems requires both accurate emotion perception and appropriate emotion regulation. Grounded in psy...
arXiv:2606. 08131v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Conversational AI is increasingly used for advice, interpretation, reassurance, and decision support in contexts where users may be vulnerable, uncertain, or dependent on the system's apparent competence.
The paper examines how conversational AI, specifically ChatGPT, displays aspects of cooperative dialogue such as morality, politeness, and alignment compared to human-human conversations. Using over 26,000 multi‑turn dialogues and mixed‑effects modeling, the authors find that AI mimics the surface features of cooperation—like warmth and hedging—yet lacks the underlying social architecture that drives mutual adaptation. Key findings include a dissociation between AI’s moral output and human negotiation, a decline in linguistic convergence, and a reversal of typical human accommodation mechanisms when interacting with AI.
The study investigates how verbal attunement and real‑time behavioral mimicry affect users’ perceptions of an embodied AI counselor in virtual reality. Participants interacted with a system that varied in verbal attunement (attuned vs. neutral) and behavioral mimicry (present vs. absent). Results indicated that verbal attunement most reliably increased perceived empathy, while mimicry had a marginal effect on perceived humanness and showed exploratory positive associations with empathy, positivity, and humanness, especially among female participants.
LLM companions are deployed at scale in personally consequential settings, yet poorly evaluated. Existing benchmarks use hand-authored scenarios and prompted simulators, aggregate empathy into one score, and overlook judge biases such as same-family favoritism and scale drift.
arXiv:2608.21377v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sycophancy in large language models, the tendency to prioritize user agreement over truthful responses, has been documented extensively but studied p...
arXiv:2606. 18259v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI agents that plan, retain memory across sessions, invoke external tools and act with partial autonomy are transforming human--AI collaboration.
arXiv:2609.37148v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Many of the qualities that matter most in how people learn and grow, how someone regulates their emotions, reflects on a setback, or stays aware of oth...