Related papers: Expecting Empathy: How Interaction Context Shapes …
As voice assistants (VAs) become increasingly integrated into daily life, the need for emotion-aware systems that can recognize and respond appropriately to user emotions has grown. While significant progress has been made in speech emotion…
Empathetic dialogue requires not only recognizing a user's emotional state but also making strategy-aware, context-sensitive decisions throughout response generation. However, the lack of a comprehensive empathy strategy framework, explicit…
Nowadays, touch remains essential for emotional conveyance and interpersonal communication as more interactions are mediated remotely. While many studies have discussed the effectiveness of using haptics to communicate emotions,…
Diffusion of information and viral content, social contagion and influence are still topics of broad evaluation. We have studied the information epidemic in a social networking platform in order compare different campaign setups. The goal…
Empathetic response generation is a desirable aspect of conversational agents, crucial for facilitating engaging and emotionally intelligent multi-turn conversations between humans and machines. Leveraging large language models for this…
Humans quite frequently interact with conversational agents. The rapid advancement in generative language modeling through neural networks has helped advance the creation of intelligent conversational agents. Researchers typically evaluate…
As artificial intelligence increasingly mediates public discourse, it becomes important to understand how human-AI collectives shape opinion formation, deliberation, and democratic outcomes. We present a novel experimental method for…
Fads, product adoption, mobs, rumors, memes, and emergent norms are diverse social contagions that have been modeled as network cascades. Empirical study of these cascades is vulnerable to what we describe as the "opacity problem": the…
General-purpose conversational AI chatbots and AI companions increasingly provide young adolescents with emotionally supportive conversations, raising questions about how conversational style shapes anthropomorphism and emotional reliance.…
In the digital environment, human attention is frequently guided by cognitive heuristics rather than deliberate evaluation. Since low-credibility narratives often lack substantive factual evidence, their diffusion disproportionally relies…
Affective polarization, the emotional divide characterized by in-group love (trust towards fellow partisans) and out-group hate (mistrust towards those with opposite political views), has become prevalent in the current society. Despite its…
As generative AI chatbots become more personalized and emotionally responsive, they increasingly serve as companions, friends, and romantic partners. Yet these relationships are accompanied by significant uncertainty: users question the…
Generative AI systems are increasingly capable of expressing emotions via text and imagery. Effective emotional expression will likely play a major role in the efficacy of AI systems -- particularly those designed to support human mental…
AI companion chatbots increasingly shape how people seek social and emotional connection, sometimes substituting for relationships with romantic partners, friends, teachers, or even therapists. When these systems adopt those metaphorical…
Prior efforts to create an autonomous computer system capable of predicting what a human being is thinking or feeling from facial expression data have been largely based on outdated, inaccurate models of how emotions work that rely on many…
Conversational artificial intelligence (AI) provides an efficient and convenient gateway to information access. However, it can cause overreliance when users blindly trust AI and accept its answers without fact-checking. Information search…
AI systems have long been expected to interact with users, answering questions, generating content, and continuing (social) conversations. Agentic AI, however, breaks from this expectation, as its primary objective is workflow execution on…
In order to truly understand how social media might shape online discourses or contribute to societal polarization, we need refined models of platform choice, that is: models that help us understand why users prefer one social media…
A prevalent shortfall among current empathic AI systems is their inability to recognize when verbal expressions may not fully reflect underlying emotional states. This is because the existing datasets, used for the training of these…
When OpenAI deprecated GPT-4o in early 2026, thousands of users protested under #keep4o, claiming newer models had "lost their empathy." No published study has tested this claim. We conducted the first clinical measurement, evaluating three…