# Category 07 — Emotional Intelligence and Empathy

This category covers what makes an AI system behave as if it understands and responds to human emotion: empathetic dialogue generation, emotion and affect recognition in text and voice, emotional-support conversation, therapeutic and companion chatbots, empathy evaluation rubrics and benchmarks, and the failure modes that accompany warmth — sycophancy, parasocial attachment, dependency, and model-change grief. It excludes general persona design and tone-style transfer as prose craft, except where they intersect with emotional stakes.

## Angle files

- [A-academic.md](A-academic.md) — Peer-reviewed and arXiv work from ACL, EMNLP, AAAI, CHI, JAMA, JMIR, NEJM AI, and *Nature Machine Intelligence*: foundational datasets (EmpatheticDialogues, EPITOME, ESConv, GoEmotions, PsyQA, EmoCause), model architectures (MoEL, MIME, CEM, KEMP, SEEK, PARTNER, ESCoT, EmPO), new 2025–2026 work (Therabot RCT, HEART benchmark, PERM reward model, Kardia-R1, ReflectDiffu, MME-Emotion, Anthropic emotion-vectors paper), emotion-recognition surveys, and field deployments including the HAILEY TalkLife RCT, the Ayers et al. physician-vs-ChatGPT comparison, and the CHI 2024 "Illusion of Empathy" critique.
- [B-industry.md](B-industry.md) — Vendor and lab posts from Anthropic, OpenAI, Hume AI, Inflection, Woebot Health, Wysa, Replika, Character.AI, Affectiva, MIT Media Lab, and the Oxford Internet Institute (via Cognaptus), covering design philosophies, the April 2025 GPT-4o sycophancy post-mortems, quantified warmth-vs-reliability tradeoffs, the shift from default personality to user-configurable presets, Hume EVI 4-mini (October 2025), Anthropic's emotion-concepts interpretability paper (April 2026), FTC companion inquiry (September 2025), and the STAT News voice-empathy safety warning (April 2026).
- [C-opensource.md](C-opensource.md) — 30 repositories covering empathetic LLM fine-tunes (EmoLLM, SoulChat/SoulChat2.0, MeChat/SMILE, PsyChat, MindChat, ChatCounselor), foundational datasets (EmpatheticDialogues, ESConv, PsyQA, MentalChat16K), EI benchmarks (EmoBench, EmoBench-M, EmotionBench, MME-Emotion, KardiaBench), RL reward models (PERM, Kardia-R1), multimodal emotion models (Emotion-LLaMA, NeurIPS 2024), living paper registries (Awesome-LLM-Empathy), and affective-audio tooling (openSMILE, SpeechBrain, pyAudioAnalysis, j-hartmann DistilRoBERTa classifier).
- [D-commercial.md](D-commercial.md) — 20-product survey spanning companion apps (Replika, Character.AI, Pi, Kindroid, Tolan, Friend, Candy.ai, Nomi, Chai), clinical chatbots (Wysa, Youper, Earkick, Elomia, Woebot — shut down June 2025), empathic-voice infrastructure (Hume EVI 4-mini, Inworld AI), and clinician-empathy tooling (Abridge), with market sizing, pricing, regulatory events through April 2026 (EU AI Act implementation, FTC inquiry, Italy Garante Replika ban), and Therabot clinical evidence.
- [E-practical.md](E-practical.md) — 18 catalogued Reddit, Hacker News, Substack, and YouTube posts including community prompt recipes for warmth repair and sycophancy resistance, conversion and recovery narratives from r/therapyGPT and r/CharacterAI, Jocelyn Skillman's relational-architecture design essay, Danielle McClune's "neatly packaged narcissism" critique, STAT News voice-chatbot risk coverage (April 2026), STAT News AI-psychosis reporting (September 2025), and a consolidated taxonomy of user-wellbeing concerns (updated to include voice-modality acceleration and AI psychosis as documented harm categories).

## Synthesis and legacy

- [SYNTHESIS.md](SYNTHESIS.md) — the distilled synthesis across all five angles
- [INDEX.md](INDEX.md) — legacy category summary, superseded by SYNTHESIS.md, preserved for traceability
