AI generates well-liked but templatic empathic responses

Empathy is central to human connection, yet people often struggle to express it effectively. In blinded evaluations, large language models (LLMs) generate responses that are often judged more empathic than human-written ones. Yet when a response is attributed to AI, recipients feel less heard than when comparable responses are attributed to a human. We built a conversation platform in which participants are asked to offer empathic support to an LLM expressing realistic troubles and conducted a randomized experiment collecting 33,938 messages spanning 2,904 text-based conversations between 968 participants and their LLM conversational partners. We find participants report feeling empathy but systematically fail to express it, but an LLM coaching intervention offering personalized feedback on effective empathic communication significantly boosts it without homogenizing participants' responses. Moreover, we derive a data-driven taxonomy of idiomatic empathic expressions in naturalistic dialogues across personal and workplace trouble scenarios. These results advance the scientific understanding of how empathy is expressed and demonstrate a scalable, AI-based intervention for scaffolding and cultivating it.

Empathetic interaction involves two distinguishable capacities: representing another person's emotional state (cognitive empathy) and generating an appropriate response to that state (affective empathy). We apply this distinction to examine how emotion-related information is internally organized, selectively attended to, and carried through response generation in Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct across 10 emotion categories from the EmpatheticDialogues dataset. Layer-wise linear probing revealed a broad middle-layer region of peak emotion-category decodability, with the layer-11 L2 probe achieving 63.6% held-out accuracy against a 10% chance level and a 54.6% TF-IDF lexical baseline. During response generation, emotion-related user tokens received 1.89 times as much attention per token as other utterance tokens, concentrated across layers 10-15. Target-emotion alignment then decreased from a mean cosine similarity of 0.239 for input representations to 0.125 for generated responses, with positive drift in 77% of examples and the largest shifts for angry and furious. Emotion-category representation, attention allocation, and response-level alignment therefore emerge as distinguishable components of model processing that can be analyzed through a functional cognitive-affective empathy framework. These findings provide a foundation for monitoring emotion representations during generation and leveraging models' existing affective structure to support more naturally empathetic responses without relying on external prompting or explicit emotion conditioning.

Large language models (LLMs) produce responses rated as highly empathic in single-turn settings (Ayers et al., 2023; Lee et al., 2024), yet they are also known to be formulaic generators that reuse the same lexical patterns, syntactic templates, and discourse structures across tasks (Jiang et al., 2025; Shaib et al., 2024; Namuduri et al., 2025). Less attention has been paid to whether this formulaicity extends to the level of discourse moves, i.e., what a response does for the person it is addressing. This question is especially consequential for empathic dialogue, where effective support demands not just a kind response at one moment but varied strategies as a conversation unfolds (Stiles et al., 1998). Indeed, prior work shows that LLMs reuse the same tactic sequences more than human supporters in single-turn settings (Gueorguieva et al., 2026). We extend this analysis to multi-turn conversations and find that the rigidity compounds: once a tactic appears in a supporter turn, LLMs reuse it in the next at nearly double the rate of humans (0.50-0.56 vs. 0.27). This pattern holds across LLMs serving as supporters in real emotional support conversations, and is invisible to standard similarity metrics. To address this gap, we introduce MINT (Multi-turn Inter-tactic Novelty Training), the first reinforcement learning framework to optimize discourse move diversity across multi-turn empathic dialogue. The best MINT variant combines an empathy quality reward with a cross-turn tactic novelty signal, improving aggregate empathy by 25.3% over vanilla across 1.7B and 4B models while reducing cross-turn discourse move repetition by 26.3% on the 4B model, surpassing all baselines including quality-only and token-level diversity methods on both measures. These results suggest that what current models lack is not empathy itself, but the ability to vary their discourse moves across a conversation.