Exploring ChatGPT's Empathic Abilities

Empathy is often understood as the ability to share and understand another individual's state of mind or emotion. With the increasing use of chatbots in various domains, e.g., children seeking help with homework, individuals looking for medical advice, and people using the chatbot as a daily source of everyday companionship, the importance of empathy in human-computer interaction has become more apparent. Therefore, our study investigates the extent to which ChatGPT based on GPT-3.5 can exhibit empathetic responses and emotional expressions. We analyzed the following three aspects: (1) understanding and expressing emotions, (2) parallel emotional response, and (3) empathic personality. Thus, we not only evaluate ChatGPT on various empathy aspects and compare it with human behavior but also show a possible way to analyze the empathy of chatbots in general. Our results show, that in 91.7% of the cases, ChatGPT was able to correctly identify emotions and produces appropriate answers. In conversations, ChatGPT reacted with a parallel emotion in 70.7% of cases. The empathic capabilities of ChatGPT were evaluated using a set of five questionnaires covering different aspects of empathy. Even though the results indicate that the empathic abilities of ChatGPT are still below the average of healthy humans, the scores are better than those of people who have been diagnosed with Asperger syndrome / high-functioning autism.