Empathetic response generation requires models to decide not only what to say, but also how to respond to the previous speaker's affective situation. We formulate this as response-side affective-orientation control and use multi-annotator emoji distributions as weak affective--attitudinal evidence, rather than as output symbols or gold labels, to induce a latent control space that operationally approximates listener stance. We construct EmojiDialogue, an utterance-level extension of EmpatheticDialogues with emoji votes and confidence scores, and propose EmoStance, which models source-side affective expression, predicts a soft response-side orientation from dialogue context and speaker roles, and steers a frozen instruction-tuned LLM through continuous prefix embeddings. In blind pairwise evaluation with 20 annotators and 800 judgments, EmoStance achieves a 62.2% decisive win rate, with the clearest gains in contextual specificity and perceived responsiveness, while remaining complementary to external-knowledge methods. Code, annotation metadata, and reconstruction scripts are available in our GitHub repository: https://github.com/18277390221/EmoStance.
Empathetic Response Generation (ERG) requires models to recognize users' emotions and generate empathetic responses. Commonsense knowledge has been shown to support such reasoning, yet existing approaches typically reuse fixed commonsense representations across understanding and generation, limiting their ability to coordinate such knowledge across different stages. We propose DCC, a Dynamic Commonsense Coordination Framework with three complementary modules: residual-based commonsense interaction (SCE-AttnRes) to integrate contextual and situational commonsense representations, Association-Guided Commonsense Filtering (AGCF) to down-weight low-relevance commonsense relations, and Iterative Commonsense-Aware Decoding (ICAD) to dynamically retrieve commonsense memories during generation. Experiments on the Empathetic-Dialogues benchmark show that DCC improves emotion classification accuracy and response diversity over the CEM baseline while maintaining comparable perplexity. An LLM-based blind evaluation further demonstrates that DCC generates responses with better relevance, coherence, and informativeness. The code and implementation details will be publicly available at https://github.com/Hanabi-Q/DCC-ERG.