Chain of Empathy: Enhancing Empathetic Response of Large Language Models Based on Psychotherapy Models

Understand

We present a novel method, the Chain of Empathy (CoE) prompting, that utilizes insights from psychotherapy to induce Large Language Models (LLMs) to reason about human emotional states.

• This method is inspired by various psychotherapy approaches including Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), Person Centered Therapy (PCT), and Reality Therapy (RT), each leading to different patterns of interpreting clients' mental states.
• LLMs without reasoning generated predominantly exploratory responses.
• However, when LLMs used CoE reasoning, we found a more comprehensive range of empathetic responses aligned with the different reasoning patterns of each psychotherapy model.