Recently, I took a survey about my mediation practices. Several of the questions concerned my use of AI before and during mediation. For example, do I use AI to conduct research about the issues in the case? Do I use AI to develop questions to ask during mediation? Do I use AI to suggest ways to get past an impasse?

My answer to these questions was negative. A recent study, though, suggests that I should rethink my use of AI before and during mediations. The study suggests that AI “understands” emotions better than humans, especially when the situation is emotionally charged.

In “New Study claims AI “understands” emotions better than us-especially in  emotionally charged situations”, the author Drew Turney (LiveScience, June 23, 2025) notes a new study published on May 21 2025 in the Journal Gemini 1.5, Psychology in which researchers from the University of Geneva and the University of Bern applied widely used emotional intelligence tests  to several different large language models (LLMS) such as ChatGPT-4, Chat-GPT-01, Gemini 1.5, Claude 3.5 Haiku and, Copilot 365 to  compare how they performed vis a vis humans and “…their ability to create new test questions that adhere to the purposes of EI tests.” (Id. at 3.-4)

Their results were interesting to say the least:

“By studying validated human responses from previous studies, the LLMs selected the “correct” response in emotional intelligence tests 81% of the time, based on the opinions of human experts, compared to 56% for humans.”

“When ChatGPT was asked to create new test questions, human assessors said these efforts stood up to the original tests in terms of equivalent difficulty and clearing the perception they weren’t paraphrasing the original questions. The correlation between the AI-generated and original tests were described as “strong”,…” (Id. at 4.)

Thus, researchers concluded that AI is better at “understanding “emotions than humans (Id. at 5).

But there is a deeper story. In reaching this conclusion, several experts noted that we must remember the methodology used: multiple-choice questions. These experts pointed out that rarely in the real world, when emotions are high, are we confronted with multiple choice questions to determine what we are feeling or should do! (Id. at 5.) :

“It’s worth noting that humans don’t always agree on what someone else is feeling, and even psychologists can interpret emotional signals differently,” said finance industry and information security expert Taimur Ijlal. “So ‘beating’ a human on a test like this doesn’t necessarily mean the AI has deeper insight. It means it gave the statistically expected answer more often.”

“They added that the ability being tested by the study isn’t emotional intelligence but something else. “AI systems are excellent at pattern recognition, especially when emotional cues follow a recognizable structure like facial expressions or linguistic signals, “said Nauman Jaffar, Founder and CEO of CliniScripts—an AI-powered documentation tool built for mental health professionals. “But equating that to a deeper ‘understanding’ of human emotion risks overstating what AI is actually doing.”  (Id.at 6)

These experts point out that while AIs are great at answering quizzes in structured quantitative environments, these are tests about emotional situations; they do not put the bot in the heat of the moment when tensions are high, which is what humans experience (Id. at 67.)

So, while AI “understands” emotions better than humans, it is questionable whether it can do so in the heat of the moment—in a real, live, tension-filled moment!

So, the upshot is that I should probably learn how to use AI in my mediations—there is more of an upside than a downside. I should just be careful about allowing it to be involved in the more emotional aspects of my mediations.

… Just something to think about.

 

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