Emotional Contagion of the Agent

What it measures

This scale measures a customer's belief that a service agent — human or AI-based — was emotionally affected by and shared the customer's feelings. Liu-Thompkins, Okazaki, and Li (2022) used it in a pilot study with 525 U.S. participants comparing human customer-service employees to AI chatbots, drawing conceptually on prior empathy and communication research rather than adapting specific items.

Response format

Likert-type scale (response format not described; possibly 7-point strongly disagree/strongly agree)

Scale items

• This agent easily got affected by the customer's emotions.
• This agent seemed to feel bad when the customer was sad or disappointed.
• It worried this agent when the customer was distressed.

Full scale items shown. Always cite the original source when using this scale in research.

Usage notes & scoring

The scale's alpha was .84 (Liu-Thompkins, Okazaki, and Li 2022, p. 1209). A CFA with several multi-item scales supported convergent and discriminant validity (AVE = .64, Web Appendix 3). Although the authors parenthetically cited Stiff et al. (1988) and Wieseke et al. (2012), item wording shows little similarity, suggesting the scale was created by the authors drawing on conceptual material in those articles rather than adapting them directly.

Citation

Liu-Thompkins, Yuping, Shintaro Okazaki, and Hairong Li (2022), "Artificial Empathy in Marketing Interactions: Bridging the Human-AI Gap in Affective and Social Customer Experience," Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 50 (6), 1198–1218.

Keywords