An Experimental Evaluation of the NeuroMessenger: A Collaborative Tool to Improve the Empathy of Text Interactions

Abstract

Empathy plays an important role in social interactions, for example, in effective teaching-learning processes in teacher-student relationships, and in the company-client or employee-customer relationships, retaining potential partners and providing them with greater satisfaction. In parallel, the Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) support people in their interactions, especially when the interlocutors are geographically distant from one another. In CMC, there are several approaches to promote empathy in social or human- computer interactions. However, for this type of communication, a little explored mechanism to gain empathy is the use of the theory of Neurolinguistics that presents the possibility of developing a Preferred Representation System (PRS) for cognition in humans. In this context, this paper presents an experimental evaluation of the NeuroMessenger, a collaborative messenger library that uses Neurolinguistics, Psychometry and Text Mining to promote empathy among interlocutors, from the PRS identification and suggestion of textual matching. The results showed that the performance with the use of NeuroMessenger, in favor of empathy, was higher, as well as there was an evidence statistically significant of the difference between the distribution of grades in the empathy evaluation,in favor of NeuroMessenger. Despite the results are satisfactory, more research on textual matching to gain empathy is needed.