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Empathy is an important skill and disposition in engineering education but measuring and assessing empathy in specific engineering contexts is a novel domain of research. In this study, we iterated on a measure of empathy in engineering design. In this refined instrument, we measured and compared responses to the same set of survey items in different configurations. In the first configuration, we measured Cognitive Empathy and Affective Empathy across three design phases. In the second configuration, we retained the focus on Cognitive Empathy and Affective Empathy and variation across three design phases, but we also differentiated between self- and other- orientated empathy. An example construct in this second configuration is Imagine-Other Cognitive Empathy in Needfinding. To provide evidence of the trustworthiness of constructs, we computed Cronbach’s alpha as a measure of internal consistency reliability and identified Spearman correlations with four extant empathy constructs as a means of external validity. All constructs in the first configuration were reliable but several constructs in the second configuration were unreliable. However, many constructs in both configurations exhibited moderate to large correlations with four existing constructs. We found students exhibited significant changes in Cognitive Empathy in Needfinding, but students did not exhibit changes in affective or cognitive empathy in other design phases. However, by employing the second configuration, we found that students demonstrated significant and positive changes in Imagine-Other Cognitive Empathy in two design phases (Concept Generation and Solution Evaluation) while exhibiting no changes in Imagine-Self Cognitive Empathy. We also analyzed students’ written responses to an open-ended question pre/post-course. This analysis revealed that, after participating in this course, students: (1) situated users as the primary rationale for design work, (2) understood addressing users’ needs as critical to design work, and (3) exhibited broadened definitions about who (or what) constitutes a user. This work provides instructors with a means to assess students’ empathy with and for users in design and to more purposefully target students’ empathic development whilst accounting for engineering design phases.
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This content will become publicly available on July 27, 2026
From Heart to Words: Generating Empathetic Responses via Integrated Figurative Language and Semantic Context Signals
Although generically expressing empathy is straightforward, effectively conveying empathy in specialized settings presents nuanced challenges. We present a conceptually motivated investigation into the use of figurative language and causal semantic context to facilitate targeted empathetic response generation within a specific mental health support domain, studying how these factors may be leveraged to promote improved response quality. Our approach achieves a 7.6% improvement in BLEU, a 36.7% reduction in Perplexity, and a 7.6% increase in lexical diversity (D-1 and D-2) compared to models without these signals, and human assessments show a 24.2% increase in empathy ratings. These findings provide deeper insights into grounded empathy understanding and response generation, offering a foundation for future research in this area.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2125411
- PAR ID:
- 10636436
- Publisher / Repository:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Date Published:
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 4490 to 4502
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Vienna, Austria
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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