A snapshot of our last summer meeting of the EMP Lab. A Happy Valley welcome to new members, graduate student
@jokretz.bsky.social & post-doc @amormino.bsky.social, & farewell to alum @rachelbuterbaugh.bsky.social, who's off to grad school. With @jdweng.bsky.social @farvk.bsky.social, a great team!

So grateful for the chance to attend the EASP Summer School organized by @jimaceverett.bsky.social. Huge thanks to @jimaceverett.bsky.social and @mgreinecke.bsky.social for your mentorship in the Moral Psych of AI workstream, and to all of the other amazing students I had the chance to learn from!

Thanks to everybody who chimed in!

I arrived at the conclusion that (1) there's a lot of interesting stuff about interactions and (2) the figure I was looking for does not exist.

So, I made it myself! Here's a simple illustration of how to control for confounding in interactions:>

I'll be sharing some data from our recent preprint on AI empathy choice (osf.io/preprints/os...) in a talk at the Society for Affective Science Annual Conference this Saturday. Stop by or reach out if you're interested in talking about AI, empathy, or causal inference!

@affectscience.bsky.social

Across multiple studies we examine this AI empathy choice paradox and explore how it varies between empathy vs. compassion, physical vs. emotional suffering, positive vs. negative situations, and explore the importance of perceived empathizer effort.

New preprint with @dcameron.bsky.social and @minzlicht.bsky.social!

We find that people choose to receive empathy from human over AI empathizers, despite finding AI responses superior in terms of empathy and making them feel more heard.

Link: osf.io/preprints/os...

On another note, the EMP Lab will be at @affectscience.bsky.social in Portland, Oregon, for anyone who'd like to chat about empathy, motivated emotion regulation, & moral outrage. My grad student @jdweng.bsky.social will be giving his first external talk on human vs. AI empathy. The coffee awaits!