Papers with psychological theory
Predicting Responses to Psychological Questionnaires from Participants’ Social Media Posts and Question Text Embeddings (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing data cannot be used to predict responses for new questions or participants. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses social media texts and the text of the question to predict a participant's questionnaire response. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be used to integrate new participants or new questions into psychological studies without costly data collection. |
Activation-Space Personality Steering: Hybrid Layer Selection for Stable Trait Control in LLMs (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Personality-aware LLMs exhibit implicit personalities in their generation, but reliably controlling or aligning these traits to meet specific needs remains an open challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline that extracts hidden state activations from transformer layers using the Big Five Personality Traits framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model extracts hidden state activations from transformer layers using the Big Five personality traits (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism) |
A Survey of Large Language Models in Psychotherapy: Current Landscape and Future Directions (2025.findings-acl)
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Hongbin Na, Yining Hua, Zimu Wang, Tao Shen, Beibei Yu, Lilin Wang, Wei Wang, John Torous, Ling Chen
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) can handle extensive context and multi-turn reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy dividing psychotherapy into stages of assessment, diagnosis, and treatment to examine LLM advancements and challenges. |
| Outcome: | The proposed taxonomy reveals imbalances in current research, such as a focus on common disorders, linguistic biases, fragmented methods, and limited theoretical integration. |
PersonaForge: Psychology-Grounded Dual-Process Architecture for Personality-Consistent Role-Playing Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to role-playing with Large Language Models lack consistency across long conversations. |
| Approach: | They propose a three-layer personality architecture grounded in psychological theory and a dual-process generation mechanism inspired by cognitive science to solve this problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces drift over 50-turn conversations by reducing personality consistency . human evaluation confirms more authentic and psychologically coherent character behaviors. |
“Mistakes Help Us Grow”: Facilitating and Evaluating Growth Mindset Supportive Language in Classrooms (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | GMSL has been shown to significantly reduce disparities in academic achievement and enhance students’ learning outcomes. |
| Approach: | They develop a coaching tool to reframe unsupportive utterances to GMSL using large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the GMSL-trained teachers in fostering a growth mindset and promoting challenge-seeking behavior. |
ESC-Judge: A Framework for Comparing Emotional Support Conversational Agents (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly power mental-health chatbots . yet the field lacks a scalable, theory-grounded way to decide which model is more effective to deploy. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that grounds head-to-head comparisons of Emotional-Support LLMs in Hill’s Exploration–Insight–Action counselling model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework matches PhD-level annotators in 85% of Exploration, 83% of Insight, and 86% of Action decisions, demonstrating human-level reliability at a fraction of the cost. |
Can Large Language Models Identify Implicit Suicidal Ideation? An Empirical Evaluation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Tong Li, Shu Yang, Junchao Wu, Jiyao Wei, Lijie Hu, Mengdi Li, Derek F. Wong, Joshua R. Oltmanns, Di Wang
| Challenge: | Existing data on suicidal ideation in private conversations are limited . a new dataset of 1,200 test cases is presented to address this gap . |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset of 1,200 test cases simulating implicit suicidal ideation in private contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes 1,200 test cases simulating implicit suicidal ideation in dialogue scenarios. |
PsyPath: Psychologically-guided Self-Exploration for Personality Detection (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Personality detection aims to label traits via identifying linguistic cues from written text. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows large language models to generate and answer psychologically meaningful questions and a hybrid scoring mechanism to evaluate the generated nodes in the reasoning paths. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on two benchmark datasets and significantly improves performance and interpretability in downstream tasks. |
Emotion-Wheel-Guided Audio-Referred Text Representation for Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for Emotion Recognition in Conversation ignore their distinct communicative roles and information capacities and apply uniform penalties regardless of affective proximity. |
| Approach: | They propose a modality-aware fusion strategy capturing linguistic features from text as the primary source and audio as a complementary component. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method captures linguistic features from text as the primary source and audio as a complementary component and supervised contrastive loss to encode emotional proximity based on Russell’s circumplex model. |