The Importance of Empathy

Take our Empathy Test

Find a therapist near me

Studies suggest LLMs can offer better emotional support and be more empathetic than humans.

What appears to be empathy may sometimes be appeasement or excessive affirmation.

Text-based studies do not capture the full spectrum of human empathy or emotional expression.

The long -term psychological effects of extensive engagement with LLMs remains unknown.

Barely a week goes by without reports of a newly uncovered impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on human psychology: “blandification” (Abdulhai et al., 2026), “cognitive debt” (Kosmyna et al., 2025), and “system 3 thinking” (Shaw & Nave, 2026) are among the terms that have been coined to describe large language model (LLM)-influenced impacts. While conducting a systematic review, I looked at 11 experiments from six different studies that have examined LLM-human engagements that focus on, or contain, a strong component related to emotions. The findings from four of these studies are worth reflecting on, with some strong claims being made about LLM capabilities in the realm of emotional support and emotional guidance.

Chen et al. (2026) investigated how effective LLMs were in offering emotional support when compared with humans. Across three studies, the authors report that LLMs were arguably more........

© Psychology Today