For a New Protocol to Promote Empathy Towards Users of Communication Technologies

We propose an experimental protocol to promote empathy towards non-verbal people, based in the training of communication with an eye-tracking device. Our framework includes one eye-tracker, one communication interface and one questionnaire. The questionnaire is applied before and after the intervention, assessing the empathy level of participants in both stages of the experiment and it extends a validated questionnaire (QCAE) to measure empathy. Our results show that, while the empathy levels seem to decrease in both control and test groups, the decrease in the test group is not as significant as in the control group. The statistical power to distinguish between the scores in both groups is 75%. While both QCAE and our extended questionnaire show a strong correlation (\(R^2=0.95\)), our extended questionnaire is more sensitive in distinguishing between both groups than the standard QCAE for which we obtain a power of 63%. Finally, we discuss limitations and future directions, such as extending the study to a larger sample and applying it to different school or working contexts.