Appraisal Framework for Clinical Empathy: A Novel Application to Breaking Bad News Conversations
Allison Claire Lahnala, Béla Neuendorf, Alexander Thomin, Charles Welch, Tina Stibane, Lucie Flek
Abstract
Empathy is essential in healthcare communication. We introduce an annotation approach that draws on well-established frameworks for clinical empathy and breaking bad news (BBN) conversations for considering the interactive dynamics of discourse relations. We construct Empathy in BBNs, a span-relation task dataset of simulated BBN conversations in German, using our annotation scheme, in collaboration with a large medical school to support research on educational tools for medical didactics. The annotation is based on 1) Pounds (2011)’s appraisal framework for clinical empathy, which is grounded in systemic functional linguistics, and 2) the SPIKES protocol for breaking bad news (Baile et al., 2000), commonly taught in medical didactics training. This approach presents novel opportunities to study clinical empathic behavior and enables the training of models to detect causal relations involving empathy, a highly desirable feature of systems that can provide feedback to medical professionals in training. We present illustrative examples, discuss applications of the annotation scheme, and insights we can draw from the framework.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.lrec-main.124
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- Torino, Italia
- Editors:
- Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
- Venues:
- LREC | COLING
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- ELRA and ICCL
- Note:
- Pages:
- 1393–1407
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.124
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Allison Claire Lahnala, Béla Neuendorf, Alexander Thomin, Charles Welch, Tina Stibane, and Lucie Flek. 2024. Appraisal Framework for Clinical Empathy: A Novel Application to Breaking Bad News Conversations. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 1393–1407, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
- Cite (Informal):
- Appraisal Framework for Clinical Empathy: A Novel Application to Breaking Bad News Conversations (Lahnala et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.lrec-main.124.pdf