Recognizing pathogenic empathy in social media

Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, Anneke Buffone, Hao Peng, Salvatore Giorgi, Johannes Eichstaedt, Lyle Ungar

Research output: Chapters, Conference Papers, Creative and Literary WorksRGC 32 - Refereed conference paper (with host publication)peer-review

23 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Empathy is an integral part of human social life, as people care about and for others who experience adversity. However, a specific "pathogenic" form of empathy, marked by automatic contagion of negative emotions, can lead to stress and burnout. This is particularly detrimental for individuals in caregiving professions who experience empathic states more frequently, because it can result in illness and high costs for health systems. Automatically recognizing pathogenic empathy from text is potentially valuable to identify at-risk individuals and monitor burnout risk in caregiving populations. We build a model to predict this type of empathy from social media language on a data set we collected of users' Facebook posts and their answers to a new questionnaire measuring empathy. We obtain promising results in identifying individuals' empathetic states from their social media (Pearson r = 0.252, p < 0.003). © Copyright 2017, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 11th International Conference on Web and Social Media, ICWSM 2017
PublisherAAAI Press
Pages448-451
ISBN (Print)9781577357889
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2017
Externally publishedYes
Event11th International Conference on Web and Social Media, ICWSM 2017 - Montreal, Canada
Duration: 15 May 201718 May 2017

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 11th International Conference on Web and Social Media, ICWSM 2017

Conference

Conference11th International Conference on Web and Social Media, ICWSM 2017
PlaceCanada
CityMontreal
Period15/05/1718/05/17

Bibliographical note

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