A Meta-Analysis comparing perceptions of human-written and AI-generated empathic responses

In the past several years we have seen much interest in how people seek out empathy from artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots, especially Large Language Models like ChatGPT. In this short paper we describe a meta-analysis of several recently-published papers and preprints on this topic. This brief meta-analysis supports a more in-depth narrative review of the literature (Ong et al., 2026). Here, we sought to answer two research questions:Research Question 1: How do people perceive AI-generated empathic responses compared to human-written empathic responses?Research Question 2: How do people perceive empathic responses which are labeled as generated by AI compared to written by humans?