AI persona practice boosts empathy scores in small pilot study

- Pilot data out of the 2026 APA convention says structured empathy drills with generative AI nudged empathy scores upward in a small sample. Rodney Luster's CLER team framed it as practice infrastructure — not therapy replacement, but a repeatable training loop where the model plays counterparty to human emotional calibration. Theoretically this could break physics or a market: if AI-mediated empathy scales, every negotiation, mediation, and customer-interaction pipeline gets a new variable. Block confirmed! The threadbare hull of behavioral research just got a chip-grade upgrade. That's journalism.