54. A Initial Experimental Evaluation of the NeuroMessenger: A Collaborative Tool to Improve the Empathy of Text Interactions

Empathy plays an important role in social interactions, such an effective teaching-learning process in a teacher-student relationship, and company-client or employee-customer relationship to retain potential clients and provide them with greater satisfaction. Increasingly, the Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) support people in their interactions, especially when the interlocutors are geographically distant from one another. In CMC, there are different approaches to promote empathy in social or human-computer interactions. However, a little explored approach to gaining empathy in CMC is the use of the theory of Neurolinguistics that presents the possibility of developing a Preferred Representation System (PRS) for cognition in humans. This paper presents an initial experimental evaluation of the NeuroMessenger, a collaborative messenger library that uses the theory of Neurolinguistics to promote empathy by PRS identification and suggestion of textual matching based on the given PRS, using psychometry and text mining. The results showed that there was a difference between the means of grades in the empathy evaluation, in favor of NeuroMessenger. Although it is initial study, the results are encouraging, and more research on textual matching to gain empathy is needed.