Ala N. Tak

Ala N. Tak, Jonathan Gratch

This paper investigates the emotional reasoning abilities of the GPT family of large language models via a component perspective. The paper first examines how the model reasons about autobiographical memories. Second, it systematically varies aspects of situations to impact emotion intensity and coping tendencies. Even without the use of prompt engineering, it is shown that GPT's predictions align significantly with human-provided appraisals and emotional labels. However, GPT faces difficulties predicting emotion intensity and coping responses. GPT-4 showed the highest performance in the initial study but fell short in the second, despite providing superior results after minor prompt engineering. This assessment brings up questions on how to effectively employ the strong points and address the weak areas of these models, particularly concerning response variability. These studies underscore the merits of evaluating models from a componential perspective.

Ala N. Tak, Amin Banayeeanzade, Anahita Bolourani et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly positioned as decision engines for hiring, healthcare, and economic judgment, yet real-world human judgment reflects a balance between rational deliberation and emotion-driven bias. If LLMs are to participate in high-stakes decisions or serve as models of human behavior, it is critical to assess whether they exhibit analogous patterns of (ir)rationalities and biases. To this end, we evaluate multiple LLM families on (i) benchmarks testing core axioms of rational choice and (ii) classic decision domains from behavioral economics and social norms where emotions are known to shape judgment and choice. Across settings, we show that deliberate "thinking" reliably improves rationality and pushes models toward expected-value maximization. To probe human-like affective distortions and their interaction with reasoning, we use two emotion-steering methods: in-context priming (ICP) and representation-level steering (RLS). ICP induces strong directional shifts that are often extreme and difficult to calibrate, whereas RLS produces more psychologically plausible patterns but with lower reliability. Our results suggest that the same mechanisms that improve rationality also amplify sensitivity to affective interventions, and that different steering methods trade off controllability against human-aligned behavior. Overall, this points to a tension between reasoning and affective steering, with implications for both human simulation and the safe deployment of LLM-based decision systems.

Ala N. Tak, Jonathan Gratch

This paper extends recent investigations on the emotional reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Current research on LLMs has not directly evaluated the distinction between how LLMs predict the self-attribution of emotions and the perception of others' emotions. We first look at carefully crafted emotion-evoking stimuli, originally designed to find patterns of brain neural activity representing fine-grained inferred emotional attributions of others. We show that GPT-4 is especially accurate in reasoning about such stimuli. This suggests LLMs agree with humans' attributions of others' emotions in stereotypical scenarios remarkably more than self-attributions of emotions in idiosyncratic situations. To further explore this, our second study utilizes a dataset containing annotations from both the author and a third-person perspective. We find that GPT-4's interpretations align more closely with human judgments about the emotions of others than with self-assessments. Notably, conventional computational models of emotion primarily rely on self-reported ground truth as the gold standard. However, an average observer's standpoint, which LLMs appear to have adopted, might be more relevant for many downstream applications, at least in the absence of individual information and adequate safety considerations.

Ala N. Tak, Amin Banayeeanzade, Anahita Bolourani et al.

Large language models (LLMs) show promising capabilities in predicting human emotions from text. However, the mechanisms through which these models process emotional stimuli remain largely unexplored. Our study addresses this gap by investigating how autoregressive LLMs infer emotions, showing that emotion representations are functionally localized to specific regions in the model. Our evaluation includes diverse model families and sizes and is supported by robustness checks. We then show that the identified representations are psychologically plausible by drawing on cognitive appraisal theory, a well-established psychological framework positing that emotions emerge from evaluations (appraisals) of environmental stimuli. By causally intervening on construed appraisal concepts, we steer the generation and show that the outputs align with theoretical and intuitive expectations. This work highlights a novel way to causally intervene and precisely shape emotional text generation, potentially benefiting safety and alignment in sensitive affective domains.

Amin Banayeeanzade, Ala N. Tak, Fatemeh Bahrani et al.

The ability to control LLMs' emulated emotional states and personality traits is essential for enabling rich, human-centered interactions in socially interactive settings. We introduce PsySET, a Psychologically-informed benchmark to evaluate LLM Steering Effectiveness and Trustworthiness across the emotion and personality domains. Our study spans four models from different LLM families paired with various steering strategies, including prompting, fine-tuning, and representation engineering. Our results indicate that prompting is consistently effective but limited in intensity control, whereas vector injections achieve finer controllability while slightly reducing output quality. Moreover, we explore the trustworthiness of steered LLMs by assessing safety, truthfulness, fairness, and ethics, highlighting potential side effects and behavioral shifts. Notably, we observe idiosyncratic effects; for instance, even a positive emotion like joy can degrade robustness to adversarial factuality, lower privacy awareness, and increase preferential bias. Meanwhile, anger predictably elevates toxicity yet strengthens leakage resistance. Our framework establishes the first holistic evaluation of emotion and personality steering, offering insights into its interpretability and reliability for socially interactive applications.