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.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{lahnala-etal-2024-appraisal,
title = "Appraisal Framework for Clinical Empathy: A Novel Application to Breaking Bad News Conversations",
author = "Lahnala, Allison Claire and
Neuendorf, B{\'e}la and
Thomin, Alexander and
Welch, Charles and
Stibane, Tina and
Flek, Lucie",
editor = "Calzolari, Nicoletta and
Kan, Min-Yen and
Hoste, Veronique and
Lenci, Alessandro and
Sakti, Sakriani and
Xue, Nianwen",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)",
month = may,
year = "2024",
address = "Torino, Italia",
publisher = "ELRA and ICCL",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.124/",
pages = "1393--1407"
}