Publication Details
| Matthias Schmidmaier, Jonathan Rupp, Sven Mayer
Using a Secondary Channel to Display the Internal Empathic Resonance of LLM-Driven Agents for Mental Health Support Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Multimodal Interaction, Association for Computing Machinery, 2025-10-11 (bib) |
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| Conversational agents are becoming increasingly popular for digital mental health support. However, while empathy is essential for effective emotional support, the unimodal request-response interaction of such systems limits empathic communication. We address this limitation through a secondary channel that displays an agent's inner reflections, similar to how nonverbal feedback in human interaction conveys cognitive and emotional states. We implemented a chatbot that generates not only conversational responses but also describes internal reasoning and emotional resonance. A user study involving N=188 participants indicated a statistically significant increase in perceived empathy (+14.7%) when the agent's internal reflections were displayed. Our findings demonstrate a practical method to enhance empathic interaction with LLM-based chatbots in empathy-critical contexts. Additionally, this work opens possibilities for multimodal systems where LLM-generated reflections may serve as input for generating nonverbal feedback. |
