  We present a novel method, the Chain of Empathy (CoE) prompting, that
utilizes insights from psychotherapy to induce Large Language Models (LLMs) to
reason about human emotional states. This method is inspired by various
psychotherapy approaches including Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT),
Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), Person Centered Therapy (PCT), and Reality
Therapy (RT), each leading to different patterns of interpreting clients'
mental states. LLMs without reasoning generated predominantly exploratory
responses. However, when LLMs used CoE reasoning, we found a more comprehensive
range of empathetic responses aligned with the different reasoning patterns of
each psychotherapy model. The CBT based CoE resulted in the most balanced
generation of empathetic responses. The findings underscore the importance of
understanding the emotional context and how it affects human and AI
communication. Our research contributes to understanding how psychotherapeutic
models can be incorporated into LLMs, facilitating the development of
context-specific, safer, and empathetic AI.
