A new study published in Communications Psychology (May 2025) demonstrates that large language models can now outperform humans on standardized emotional intelligence (EI) assessments. Researchers evaluated six generative AI systems—GPT-4, Claude, Gemini, and others—using five validated tests designed to measure the ability to understand, interpret, and reason about emotions in context.

Picture this: you’re on the phone with a customer service AI agent, stuck in an endless loop of “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that.” Your frustration mounts with each repetition of the same request. We’ve all been there, and it’s a far cry from a great customer experience. The missing ingredient? Emotional Intelligence. Words alone often fail to convey a customer’s true feelings. This is where Emotion AI comes in – technology that allows AI agents to “listen between the lines” and detect the tone behind the words.

I’ve always believed that some of the best ideas come from the most unexpected places. As Autism Acceptance Month winds down, I find myself reflecting on how neurodiversity has shaped my journey in technology. Valence started in a hackathon building consumer accessibility tech for autism. That experience profoundly shaped the way I think about neurodiversity: people who think differently often see problems—and solutions—that the rest of us overlook. The experience wasn’t just an exercise in coding; it was a lesson in empathy and creativity.​

For decades, we’ve taught AI to recognize faces, predict markets, and write code. But in the most human part of business—conversation—it’s still flying blind. It can parse words but misses intent. It can summarize meetings but doesn’t know when a deal is slipping away. It can generate responses but can’t tell if it just made someone angrier.

Emotions are difficult to understand, even for humans. Because of this, building AI systems to accurately identify emotions is also a hard problem to solve. Many things can factor into how someone reads another person’s emotions: tonality, facial expression, context, words said, nonverbal cues, etc.

Coined by Dr. Milton, the double empathy problem challenges us to rethink the dynamics of communication and understanding across neurotypes. By exploring the double empathy problem, we can work towards fostering more inclusive and empathetic communication in our increasingly neurodiverse world.

Sensory substitution and augmentation have emerged as innovative approaches to enhance human perception and interaction with the world. By providing alternative means of accessing and processing information, these technologies can compensate for sensory impairments, enrich experiences, and offer new possibilities for communication and exploration. In this post, we will delve into the history and science behind sensory substitution and augmentation, with a special focus on haptic technology.

Alexithymia is a condition characterized by difficulty in identifying, describing, and understanding one's own emotions and those of others. This can significantly impact social interactions, emotional regulation, and overall quality of life. While alexithymia can affect anyone, it is more commonly found in autistic people and those with ADHD.

Neurodiversity spans the vastness of neural baselines and urges us to consider that there is not one optimal neural circuitry. And this idea changes our understanding of what it means to be autistic, dyslexic, or to have ADHD.

A new Stanford University study finds that autistic children have “aberrant functional connectivity between voice-sensitive auditory cortex and the bilateral TPJ during emotional prosody processing.”