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The current research elucidates the role of empathy in design of artificial intelligence (AI) systems in healthcare context, through a structured literature review, analysis and synthesis of academic literature published between 1990 and 2024.

This study aims to advance the domain of empathy in AI by adopting theory constructs context method approach using the PRISMA 2020 framework.

The study presents a current state-of-the-art literature to review the connections between empathy and AI and identifying four clusters showing the emerging trajectories in the field of AI and empathy in healthcare setting.

Despite a rise in empirical research, the potential pathways enhancing AI accountability by incorporation of empathy is unclear. The research aims to contribute to the existing literature on AI and empathy in the healthcare sector by carving out four distinct clusters depicting the future research avenues.

We examined how high school students demonstrated historical empathy through conducting local history place-based research to create an exhibit and companion book about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on their community. The majority of existing historical empathy scholarship focuses on classroom-based inquiry of historical events, people and time periods. We contend that broader examination of how historical empathy can be promoted beyond school-based instruction can contribute to the field by examining how student analyses of historical contexts and perspectives, and making affective connections to historical topics of study are needed when engaging in placed-based local history projects.

Qualitative case study methodology was implemented for this study. A Likert-scale survey with a questionnaire was distributed to 30 high school study participants. Thirteen students gave follow-up interviews. Students’ responses on the surveys, interviews and questionnaires were organized into three categories that aligned to the theoretical framework – identification of historical contexts of the sources that students collected, analysis of how contexts shaped the perspectives expressed in the collected sources and expression of reasoned connections between the students’ emotions and experiences during the pandemic. A rubric was used to examine how students’ writing samples and reflections reflected demonstration of historical empathy.

Students responded that their local history research about the pandemic contributed to their displays of historical empathy. Students displayed weaker evidence of historical empathy while examining archival resources to explain the historical contexts of the pandemic. Student demonstration of historical empathy was stronger when analyzing community-sourced documents for perspectives and making reasoned affective connections to what they learned about the historical significance of the pandemic. The place-based aspects of this project were strongly connected to the students’ engagement in historical empathy because the sources they analyzed were relevant to their experiences and identities as citizens in their community.

Documenting the diverse human experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic is crucial to preserving the history of this extraordinary time. Every person around the globe experienced the pandemic differently, hence riding out the same storm in different boats. At some point, the pandemic will appear in historical narratives of the social studies curriculum. Therefore, now is an opportune time to ascertain whether place-based local history research about the contexts, perspectives and experiences of community members and children themselves, during the pandemic can foster historical empathy.

The rising occurrence of digitally driven public consumer complaints has made it necessary for enterprises to obtain consumer forgiveness. However, existing research has provided little understanding regarding how to obtain consumer forgiveness effectively. Thus, the present study examined how brand avatars can improve consumer forgiveness in the context of public apology.

This study tested the mechanism of a brand avatar on consumer forgiveness using three studies. Specifically, we explored the direct and mediating effect of empathy toward a brand (Study 1); we identified the moderating mediating effect of humorous responses (Study 2) and product type (Study 3). Data for these studies were collected on Credamo. We analyzed the data using SPSS (26.0) for the primary analysis and PROCESS (3.5) for the mediating and moderating mediating analysis.

The results indicate that brand avatars enhance consumer forgiveness. Moreover, empathy toward a brand plays a mediating role in the effect of brand avatars on consumer forgiveness. Additionally, when a humorous response is present, a brand avatar can enhance customer forgiveness through empathy toward that brand. Compared to utilitarian products, hedonic products can also increase the impact of a brand avatar on empathy toward the brand, thus enhancing consumers' forgiveness.

From the perspective of emotion, this study explored the impact of brand avatars on consumer forgiveness via empathy toward a brand. It augments the research on brand avatars and consumer forgiveness. The study also verified the moderating mediating effect of humor response and product type while expanding the brand avatar research boundary.

Drawing upon the stimulus-organism-response model, this study aims to explore the impact of soft aspects of service quality on revisit intention through the mechanism of perceived empathy.

For the examination of the hypothesized relationships, the study adopts structural equation modelling to analyse the data of 562 respondents (i.e. 281 family members and 281 inpatients).

The empirical results suggest that service quality increased family member empathy perception, which, in turn, improved inpatients’ revisit intentions.

Past studies have focused on the roles of overall service quality. The authors have extended the literature by examining the specific but important aspect of service quality and its effects on emotional response. Importantly, the study explains that the affective reactions of a patient’s family, fastened with perceived empathy, have a central role in influencing the patients’ subsequent reactions. Moreover, the prior studies collected the data either from hospital employees or patients. However, in the present study, the authors used a unique sample (family members as well as patients) to have a deeper understanding. Thus, the study enhances the literature on the stimuli-response (i.e. service quality – revisit intentions) relationship in the context of service marketing in general and health care in specific. Important academic and managerial contributions and recommendations for future research are discussed.

A limited number of studies have aimed at understanding behavior towards animal welfare. However, there are indications that consumers make an important distinction between land animals and fish. As no studies have attempted to explain the factors that influence consumer behavior towards the welfare of fish, this study aims to explain the behavior using the value–belief–norm (VBN) model. In addition, we extend the model by using empathy as a factor influencing the formation of personal norms. This study argues that by adding empathy to the model, we will improve the ability of the VBN to explain moral behavior.

The study is based on survey data from 416 Norwegian consumers. A structural equation modeling analysis with latent constructs is used to test the hypotheses.

The findings validate the ability of the VBN model to explain consumer intention to buy products containing fish with better welfare. We also showed that empathy and beliefs strongly influence personal norms. The extended VBN model increased the explained variance of personal norm by 11,54%. Consumers with biospheric values are strongly likely to have empathetic feelings towards fish suffering and believe that fish can feel pain. However, consumers with hedonistic values are significantly negatively related to beliefs and empathy.

By understanding the role of empathy, companies can develop marketing strategies that appeal to consumers' values, empathy and beliefs and ultimately encourage them to make purchases that support fish welfare.

Practically, this study explores consumers' beliefs towards fish welfare and identifies consumers who are more likely to purchase products containing fish with better welfare based on their values.

The study aims to provide concrete service remediation and enhancement for LLM developers such as getting user forgiveness and breaking through perceived bottlenecks. It also aims to improve the efficiency of app users' usage decisions.

This paper takes the user reviews of the app stores in 21 countries and 10 languages as the research data, extracts the potential factors by LDA model, exploratively takes the misalignment between user ratings and textual emotions as user forgiveness and perceived bottleneck and uses the Word2vec-SVM model to analyze the sentiment. Finally, attributions are made based on empathy.

The results show that AI-based LLMs are more likely to cause bias in user ratings and textual content than regular APPs. Functional and economic remedies are effective in awakening empathy and forgiveness, while empathic remedies are effective in reducing perceived bottlenecks. Interestingly, empathetic users are “pickier”. Further social network analysis reveals that problem solving timeliness, software flexibility, model updating and special data (voice and image) analysis capabilities are beneficial in breaking perceived bottlenecks. Besides, heterogeneity analysis show that eastern users are more sensitive to the price factor and are more likely to generate forgiveness through economic remedy, and there is a dual interaction between basic attributes and extra boosts in the East and West.

The “gap” between negative (positive) user reviews and ratings, that is consumer forgiveness and perceived bottlenecks, is identified in unstructured text; the study finds that empathy helps to awaken user forgiveness and understanding, while it is limited to bottleneck breakthroughs; the dataset includes a wide range of countries and regions, findings are tested in a cross-language and cross-cultural perspective, which makes the study more robust, and the heterogeneity of users' cultural backgrounds is also analyzed.

Dysfunctional customer behavior (DCB) is costly and problematic for organizations. This research seeks to understand how DCB spreads and how businesses can effectively deal with it through employee intervention.

This research conducted a survey study and an experimental study to examine the proposed model.

Through two studies, we discovered that when an employee intervenes to stop DCB and is perceived as having high coping ability, observing customers learn from the employee’s action, resulting in reduced empathy toward the dysfunctional customer and diminished intentions to engage in DCB. Conversely, if they perceive the employee as having low coping ability, the intervention backfires, enhancing the observers’ empathy toward the dysfunctional customer and consequently leading them to engage in more DCB.

This research unveils an additional mechanism that explains the spread of DCB. It also contributes to the employee intervention literature by shedding light on when employee intervention can backfire. Further, our application of social learning theory along with the person-situation interaction literature offers a fresh perspective in explaining service exchanges.

This study aims to examine the role of hospitableness towards refugees, as embraced by local hosts, in engendering positive social outcomes, including fostering favourable attitudes and empathy towards refugees, satisfaction from hosting refugees in private dwellings and advocacy for hosting them.

Rooted in the contact theory and drawing on a hospitality social lens framework, the study uses a mixed-methods approach using a sequential quantitative-qualitative design to understand the interface between hospitableness, attitudes and empathy towards refugees, satisfaction from hosting refugees in private dwellings and advocacy for hosting them. A conceptual model is proposed and tested using 160 valid surveys collected from individuals hosting Ukrainian refugees in Slovakia. SEM-PLS is used to test the proposed model. A total of 25 in-depth interviews with Slovakian individuals hosting refugees in private dwellings were also conducted to explain and further explore the initial quantitative results.

The findings indicate that hospitableness has a positive effect on attitudes towards refugees, fosters a sense of empathy and results in satisfaction from hosting refugees. Interestingly, while hospitableness per se does not directly affect advocacy for hosting refugees, it does so indirectly via favourable attitudes towards refugees and satisfaction from the hosting experience. While qualitative findings largely support and further explain the quantitative results, interesting insights are also obtained.

The study advocates that hospitableness should be addressed through a social lens beyond its traditional commercial boundaries. Several implications for policymakers, NGOs and other stakeholders involved in hosting refugees are proposed. Overall, policies need to be oriented towards harnessing the power of refugee hosting schemes, thus increasing the role of hospitableness in addressing societal challenges such as the refugee crisis.

While not new, private hosting of refugees has recently gained momentum following the outbreak of the Ukrainian refugee crisis. In spite of some valuable research delving into hosting experiences from the refugees’ and hosts’ perspectives, this research stream is notably fragmented and largely exploratory. Specifically, there seems to be no comprehensive understanding of how hospitableness towards refugees, as embraced by hosts, can engender positive social outcomes, including fostering favourable attitudes and empathy towards refugees, satisfaction from hosting refugees and advocacy for hosting refugees in private dwellings. Overall, hospitality research is notably biased towards commercial settings, focusing on instrumental benefits rather than societal outcomes. This study focuses on the societal outcomes of hospitableness as a tool to address the refugee crisis.

Drawing on the socioemotional selectivity theory and the volunteerism literature, this study aims to examine the influence of empathy, altruism and opportunity recognition, on social entrepreneurial intentions (SEI) of people who have retired from a full-time career. Furthermore, the study examines whether the above-mentioned relationships are mediated by moral obligation.

A set of hypotheses is tested by applying partial least squares structural equation modelling on a survey sample of 227 retirees in Oman, who had participated in an entrepreneurial leadership training after retirement. Using SmartPLS software, the path model is tested through bootstrapping.

The findings suggest that altruism and opportunity recognition do not have a direct relationship with SEI, however, they are significant only when mediated through moral obligation. Nevertheless, empathy has a significant direct association with SEI, and an indirect relationship through moral obligation.

The findings of this study demonstrate that to develop intentions to indulge in social entrepreneurship, among retirees who are approaching their senior years, the focus should be on driving their sense of moral obligation to society. Hence, policymakers and authorities connected to social wellbeing goals can fine-tune their initiatives, such as training, by emphasizing on moral obligation to address social issues through social entrepreneurship.

The novelty of this study is twofold. Firstly, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, it seems to be among the first empirical study that is at the crossroads of the senior entrepreneurship and the social entrepreneurship literature. Secondly, this study fills a gap in the extant literature by deploying the socioemotional selectivity theory to examine the antecedents of SEI of people who have retired from full-time employment in their early to late senior years.