I Don't Need Solution. I Need Emotional Support : Empathetic LLMs based on Emotional Validation

Empathy plays a crucial role in prosocial behavior and supportive human interactions. According to emotional validation theory, effective empathetic conversations require observing and reflecting on the help-seeker's situation before offering emotional support and guidance. While recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have enabled fluent and coherent dialogue generation, our preliminary study reveals that existing LLMs struggle to generate emotional support response. Instead, they tend to offer repetitive solutions without sufficiently considering the emotional needs of help-seekers. To address this limitation, we propose EVA: empathetic LLMs with Emotional VAlidation. EVA enhances empathetic response generation through a two-stage training process: empathy acquisition and emotional validation alignment. For the emotional validation alignment, we introduce the Emotional Validation Aware Dataset (EVAD), which is annotated with levels of emotional validation theory as conversations progress. Additionally, we propose EVAEval, a novel evaluation metric designed to assess whether a model-generated response aligns with emotional validation theory. Experimental results demonstrate that the EVA method significantly improves empathetic response generation, achieving superior performance in both automatic and human evaluations. Furthermore, comprehensive analyses confirm that the EVA method effectively mitigates patterned responses while ensuring adherence to emotional validation principles. LEVEL I'm sorry to hear that you're going through that. Can you tell me more about what's been happening that's making you feel this way? LEVEL 1 It sounds like you're feeling really hurt and left out because it seems like your friends are engaging in group activities without you. It's tough when you feel that people you care about are distancing themselves. LEVEL 2 It's understandable to feel hurt when you're excluded from things that others are doing. You shouldn't downplay your feelings or consider them as being too sensitive.