Personalized humor in peer stories boosts older adults empathy
When a Story Feels Like Mine: How Personalized Narratives and Humor Shape Older Adults' Empathy toward LLM-Generated Peer Health Stories
Human-Computer Interaction
Summary
It's hard to share health stories that match every older person's needs and style. The authors created a system that uses AI to write personalized health stories with or without humor. They found that making stories feel more personal helps older adults connect with them better, especially those who don't usually like humor. This means how funny a story is can change how people relate to it. The study shows tailoring stories by both personal details and humor helps older adults feel more supported by these AI-written stories.
What this means in practice
- •For digital health developers: Create AI tools that generate personalized health stories to better engage older adults in health behavior change programs.
- •For health communication teams: Design tailored health messaging that adapts humor and personalization to increase older adults’ empathy and motivation.
Authors
Kexin Quan, Precious Olalere, Smit Desai, Jessie Chin
Abstract
Peer stories have been shown to boost self-efficacy in older adults' health behavior change. Despite their effectiveness, peer stories are difficult to deploy in health promotion at scale given the difficulty of matching the diverse health concerns and coping styles of heterogeneous older populations. Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to generate authentic narratives, yet how personalization and narrative affective style, such as humor, jointly shape older adults' responses remains unknown. We developed a theory-driven system that generates first-person peer health narratives varying in personalization and humor through a three-stage LLM pipeline grounded in self-efficacy mechanisms. Thirty-one older adults were invited to participate in a within-subjects lab study. Results showed that personalization increased perceived relatability and relevance of peer stories, especially for older adults with lower humor preference. These findings position individual differences in affective styles as a second dimension in designing personalization for LLM-assisted health communication.