Empathic Inclination from Digital Footprints

The large amount of personal data left by users on the Internet is a valuable source of information for improving the efficacy of profiling tasks. In particular, the data collected from social media can disclose personal habits, preferences and affective traits. The study is focused on the emphatic inclination of a subject, i.e. the ability to feel and share another person’s emotions, which can be a relevant aspect to consider in retrieval or recommendation processes. To support this idea, a model was proposed to predict its level and to emphasize the correlations with explicit features that characterize the user.