ChatGPT beats humans in emotional awareness tests, study finds

ChatGPT is an AI chatbot that can generate natural and coherent text across various domains, such as news, fiction, poetry, and more. It is powered by a large and complex neural network, GPT-3, which can learn from massive and diverse datasets and perform multiple tasks.

But ChatGPT is not only good at producing text, but it is also good at understanding emotions. A new study by researchers from the University of Manchester and the University of Helsinki found that ChatGPT greatly outperformed humans in emotional awareness tasks in fictional textual scenarios. It was much better than typical people estimating the emotions characters would likely experience.

The study, published in Psychological Science, aimed to quantify ChatGPT's emotional awareness capabilities using the Levels of Emotional Awareness Scale (LEAS) as a metric. LEAS is a performance-based test that assesses emotional awareness by analyzing responses to 20 scenarios describing emotionally charged situations, such as losing a friend, getting a promotion, or witnessing a crime.

The researchers compared ChatGPT's responses with the general population norms and two independent licensed psychologists who evaluated the appropriateness of ChatGPT's responses in the given context. The researchers also conducted a follow-up assessment one month later to evaluate ChatGPT's learning curve.

The results were quite impressive. In the initial examination, ChatGPT outperformed the general population across all LEAS scales with a significant Z-score of 2.84. ChatGPT's performance improved dramatically in the follow-up assessment, nearly reaching the maximum possible LEAS score with an elevated Z-score of 4.26. The accuracy of its responses also scored exceptionally high at 9.7 out of 10.

The researchers concluded that ChatGPT can generate contextually accurate emotional responses and that its performance significantly improves over time. They also suggested that ChatGPT could be a valuable tool in cognitive training for clinical populations with emotional awareness impairments and in facilitating psychiatric diagnosis and assessment.

This study not only demonstrates that ChatGPT is proficient in understanding and expressing emotions but also that it has a remarkable ability to learn from its interactions. This capability could have profound theoretical and clinical implications and ethical and social challenges.