Apathetic or Empathetic? Evaluating LLMs' Emotional Alignments with Humans

Jen-tse Huang, Man Ho LAM, Eric John Li, Shujie Ren, Wenxuan Wang, Wenxiang Jiao, Zhaopeng Tu, Michael Lyu

Keywords: LLM, Evaluation, Emotions

TL;DR: We introduce EmotionBench (which includes eight negative emotions) to evaluate LLMs' emotional alignments with human norms collected from >1200 human responses.

Abstract: Evaluating Large Language Models’ (LLMs) anthropomorphic capabilities has become increasingly important in contemporary discourse. Utilizing the emotion appraisal theory from psychology, we propose to evaluate the empathy ability of LLMs, i.e., how their feelings change when presented with specific situations. After a careful and comprehensive survey, we collect a dataset containing over 400 situations that have proven effective in eliciting the eight emotions central to our study. Categorizing the situations into 36 factors, we conduct a human evaluation involving more than 1,200 subjects worldwide. With the human evaluation results as references, our evaluation includes seven LLMs, covering both commercial and open-source models, including variations in model sizes, featuring the latest iterations, such as GPT-4, Mixtral-8x22B, and LLaMA-3.1. We find that, despite several misalignments, LLMs can generally respond appropriately to certain situations. Nevertheless, they fall short in alignment with the emotional behaviors of human beings and cannot establish connections between similar situations. Our collected dataset of situations, the human evaluation results, and the code of our testing framework, i.e., EmotionBench, are publicly available at https://github.com/CUHK-ARISE/EmotionBench.

Primary Area: Natural language processing

Submission Number: 13766