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A Computational Approach to Understanding Empathy Expressed in Text-Based Mental Health Support

arXiv 2009.08441 ↗First posted 17 Sep 2020cs.CL cs.SIcited by 182

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Abstract (arXiv)

Empathy is critical to successful mental health support. Empathy measurement has predominantly occurred in synchronous, face-to-face settings, and may not translate to asynchronous, text-based contexts. Because millions of people use text-based platforms for mental health support, understanding empathy in these contexts is crucial. In this work, we present a computational approach to understanding how empathy is expressed in online mental health platforms. We develop a novel unifying theoretically-grounded framework for characterizing the communication of empathy in text-based conversations. We collect and share a corpus of 10k (post, response) pairs annotated using this empathy framework with supporting evidence for annotations (rationales). We develop a multi-task RoBERTa-based bi-encoder model for identifying empathy in conversations and extracting rationales underlying its predictions. Experiments demonstrate that our approach can effectively identify empathic conversations. We further apply this model to analyze 235k mental health interactions and show that users do not self-learn empathy over time, revealing opportunities for empathy training and feedback.

Key facts. Cited by 182 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 17 Sep 2020.

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Citing papers per year: 2021: 16; 2022: 16; 2023: 35; 2024: 46; 2025: 34; 2026: 35.

182 papers.

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  1. 2021Towards Emotional Support Dialog Systemscited by 294
  2. 2023Can Large Language Models Transform Computational Social Science?cited by 245
  3. 2021Latent Hatred: A Benchmark for Understanding Implicit Hate Speechcited by 216
  4. 2021PsyQA: A Chinese Dataset for Generating Long Counseling Text for Mental Health Supportcited by 92
  5. 2024Towards Conversational Diagnostic AIcited by 79
  6. 2023Cognitive Reframing of Negative Thoughts through Human-Language Model Interactioncited by 77
  7. 2021Towards Facilitating Empathic Conversations in Online Mental Health Support: A Reinforcement Learning Approachcited by 75
  8. 2021On the Safety of Conversational Models: Taxonomy, Dataset, and Benchmarkcited by 73
  9. 2023Humanoid Agents: Platform for Simulating Human-like Generative Agentscited by 73
  10. 2022Human-AI Collaboration Enables More Empathic Conversations in Text-based Peer-to-Peer Mental Health Supportcited by 68
  11. 2023Cue-CoT: Chain-of-thought Prompting for Responding to In-depth Dialogue Questions with LLMscited by 62
  12. 2023Do LLMs Understand Social Knowledge? Evaluating the Sociability of Large Language Models with SocKET Benchmarkcited by 62
38 more
  1. 2023Building Emotional Support Chatbots in the Era of LLMscited by 62
  2. 2022Improving Multi-turn Emotional Support Dialogue Generation with Lookahead Strategy Planningcited by 59
  3. 2023Facilitating Self-Guided Mental Health Interventions Through Human-Language Model Interaction: A Case Study of Cognitive Restructuringcited by 53
  4. 2021Beyond Fair Pay: Ethical Implications of NLP Crowdsourcingcited by 52
  5. 2024ESCoT: Towards Interpretable Emotional Support Dialogue Systemscited by 46
  6. 2021Perspective-taking and Pragmatics for Generating Empathetic Responses Focused on Emotion Causescited by 43
  7. 2021CoMAE: A Multi-factor Hierarchical Framework for Empathetic Response Generationcited by 42
  8. 2023Harnessing the Power of Large Language Models for Empathetic Response Generation: Empirical Investigations and Improvementscited by 42
  9. 2023Using Imperfect Surrogates for Downstream Inference: Design-based Supervised Learning for Social Science Applications of Large Language Modelscited by 37
  10. 2024Large Language Models Produce Responses Perceived to be Empathiccited by 36
  11. 2024Large Language Models in Mental Health Care: a Scoping Reviewcited by 34
  12. 2023Empowering Psychotherapy with Large Language Models: Cognitive Distortion Detection through Diagnosis of Thought Promptingcited by 31
  13. 2024PsychoGAT: A Novel Psychological Measurement Paradigm through Interactive Fiction Games with LLM Agentscited by 28
  14. 2023Chain of Empathy: Enhancing Empathetic Response of Large Language Models Based on Psychotherapy Modelscited by 24
  15. 2024SweetieChat: A Strategy-Enhanced Role-playing Framework for Diverse Scenarios Handling Emotional Support Agentcited by 24
  16. 2025RLVER: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Emotion Rewards for Empathetic Agentscited by 24
  17. 2025From Personas to Talks: Revisiting the Impact of Personas on LLM-Synthesized Emotional Support Conversationscited by 23
  18. 2023Rationalization for Explainable NLP: A Surveycited by 22
  19. 2024STICKERCONV: Generating Multimodal Empathetic Responses from Scratchcited by 21
  20. 2024Can AI Relate: Testing Large Language Model Response for Mental Health Supportcited by 21
  21. 2025When Large Language Models are Reliable for Judging Empathic Communicationcited by 21
  22. 2021Conversations Gone Alright: Quantifying and Predicting Prosocial Outcomes in Online Conversationscited by 20
  23. 2022Empathic Conversations: A Multi-level Dataset of Contextualized Conversationscited by 20
  24. 2024The Colorful Future of LLMs: Evaluating and Improving LLMs as Emotional Supporters for Queer Youthcited by 20
  25. 2022Empathetic Dialogue Generation via Sensitive Emotion Recognition and Sensible Knowledge Selectioncited by 19
  26. 2024Understanding the Therapeutic Relationship between Counselors and Clients in Online Text-based Counseling using LLMscited by 19
  27. 2024PATIENT-Psi: Using Large Language Models to Simulate Patients for Training Mental Health Professionalscited by 19
  28. 2024Are Large Language Models More Empathetic than Humans?cited by 18
  29. 2022Identifying Moments of Change from Longitudinal User Textcited by 17
  30. 2023Harnessing Large Language Models' Empathetic Response Generation Capabilities for Online Mental Health Counselling Supportcited by 17
  31. 2024Multi-Level Feedback Generation with Large Language Models for Empowering Novice Peer Counselorscited by 16
  32. 2024HEART-felt Narratives: Tracing Empathy and Narrative Style in Personal Stories with LLMscited by 16
  33. 2023Boosting Distress Support Dialogue Responses with Motivational Interviewing Strategycited by 15
  34. 2024ESC-Eval: Evaluating Emotion Support Conversations in Large Language Modelscited by 15
  35. 2022Empathetic Conversational Systems: A Review of Current Advances, Gaps, and Opportunitiescited by 14
  36. 2023Modeling Empathic Similarity in Personal Narrativescited by 14
  37. 2023Leveraging Large Language Models for Automated Dialogue Analysiscited by 14
  38. 2024ERD: A Framework for Improving LLM Reasoning for Cognitive Distortion Classificationcited by 14

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