HEART-felt Narratives: Tracing Empathy and Narrative Style in Personal Stories with LLMs

Jocelyn J Shen, Joel Mire, Hae Won Park, Cynthia Breazeal, Maarten Sap


Abstract
Empathy serves as a cornerstone in enabling prosocial behaviors, and can be evoked through sharing of personal experiences in stories. While empathy is influenced by narrative content, intuitively, people respond to the way a story is told as well, through narrative style. Yet the relationship between empathy and narrative style is not fully understood. In this work, we empirically examine and quantify this relationship between style and empathy using LLMs and large-scale crowdsourcing studies. We introduce a novel, theory-based taxonomy, HEART (Human Empathy and Narrative Taxonomy) that delineates elements of narrative style that can lead to empathy with the narrator of a story. We establish the performance of LLMs in extracting narrative elements from HEART, showing that prompting with our taxonomy leads to reasonable, human-level annotations beyond what prior lexicon-based methods can do. To show empirical use of our taxonomy, we collect a dataset of empathy judgments of stories via a large-scale crowdsourcing study with N=2,624 participants. We show that narrative elements extracted via LLMs, in particular, vividness of emotions and plot volume, can elucidate the pathways by which narrative style cultivates empathy towards personal stories. Our work suggests that such models can be used for narrative analyses that lead to human-centered social and behavioral insights.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.59
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1026–1046
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.59
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.59
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jocelyn J Shen, Joel Mire, Hae Won Park, Cynthia Breazeal, and Maarten Sap. 2024. HEART-felt Narratives: Tracing Empathy and Narrative Style in Personal Stories with LLMs. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 1026–1046, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
HEART-felt Narratives: Tracing Empathy and Narrative Style in Personal Stories with LLMs (Shen et al., EMNLP 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.59.pdf