Empathy is often understood as the ability to share and understand another individual's state of mind or emotion. With the increasing use of chatbots in various domains, e.g., children seeking help with homework, individuals looking for medical advice, and people using the chatbot as a daily source of everyday companionship, the importance of empathy in human-computer interaction has become more apparent. Therefore, our study investigates the extent to which ChatGPT based on GPT-3.5 can exhibit empathetic responses and emotional expressions. We analyzed the following three aspects: (1) understanding and expressing emotions, (2) parallel emotional response, and (3) empathic personality. Thus, we not only evaluate ChatGPT on various empathy aspects and compare it with human behavior but also show a possible way to analyze the empathy of chatbots in general. Our results show, that in 91.7% of the cases, ChatGPT was able to correctly identify emotions and produces appropriate answers. In conversations, ChatGPT reacted with a parallel emotion in 70.7% of cases. The empathic capabilities of ChatGPT were evaluated using a set of five questionnaires covering different aspects of empathy. Even though the results indicate that the empathic abilities of ChatGPT are still below the average of healthy humans, the scores are better than those of people who have been diagnosed with Asperger syndrome / high-functioning autism.

翻译：共情通常被理解为分享和理解他人心理状态或情感的能力。随着聊天机器人在各领域的广泛应用，例如儿童寻求作业帮助、个人咨询医疗建议、以及将聊天机器人作为日常陪伴来源的人群，人机交互中共情的重要性日益凸显。因此，本研究探讨了基于GPT-3.5的ChatGPT在展现共情回应和情感表达方面的能力。我们从以下三个维度进行分析：(1) 理解与表达情感，(2) 平行情感反应，以及(3) 共情人格。由此，我们不仅从多个共情维度评估ChatGPT并与人类行为进行比较，还展示了分析聊天机器人共情能力的通用方法。结果表明，在91.7%的案例中，ChatGPT能准确识别情感并产生恰当回应。在对话中，ChatGPT在70.7%的案例中表现出平行情感反应。通过五份涵盖共情不同方面的问卷评估，尽管结果显示ChatGPT的共情能力仍低于健康人类平均水平，但其得分优于确诊为阿斯伯格综合征/高功能自闭症的患者。