Existing emotional support conversation systems mainly focus on one-on-one seeker-supporter interactions and individual emotional states, leaving interpersonal relations in multi-party scenarios under...
The study evaluates PAIR, a theory-based emotion‑regulation companion, over 14 days with 19 participants, analyzing 1,093 sessions. Emotion estimates from the agent aligned better with participants’ self‑reported valence and dominance than arousal, and guided conversations led to higher valence and state‑dependent arousal changes. Participants reported feeling understood, and the perceived helpfulness of guided conversations increased over time, highlighting the role of memory updates and cross‑session personalization in sustained emotional support.
By Kexin Quan, Zijian Ding, Jiaye Yong, Qinshi Zhang, Dong Wang, Jessie Chin
arXiv:2608. 02046v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: LLM companions are deployed at scale in personally consequential settings, yet poorly evaluated.
By Yao Liu, Guangjia Chai, Yuming Huang, Jihao Huang, Lei Wang, Junchen Wan
The paper introduces RESCUE-BENCH, a benchmark for relation-aware multi‑party emotional support conversation systems. It is built from real couple and family interview data, comprising 191 samples, 7,079 annotated turns, and 1,064.8 minutes of video, and defines six tasks that assess relational understanding and relation‑sensitive support. Experiments with ten large language models show that while they handle local emotional cues reasonably well, they struggle with tasks that require modeling interpersonal relations, such as predicting relation patterns, viewpoints, and support strategies.
By Haichuan Hu, Yang Xiao, Mingni Tang, Jiawen Duan, Quanjun Zhang, Congqing He, Hao Zhang, Jiashuo Wang, Johan F. Hoorn, Wenjie Li
LLM companions are deployed at scale in personally consequential settings, yet poorly evaluated. Existing benchmarks use hand-authored scenarios and prompted simulators, aggregate empathy into one score, and overlook judge biases such as same-family favoritism and scale drift.
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for emotional support, raising concern that sustained use may draw users away from their real-world relationships. Yet existing evaluations primarily...
arXiv:2610.09569v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for emotional support, raising concern that sustained use may draw users away from their real-world...
By Shivam Shukla, Jihye Kim, Shubham Gaur, Mahnaz Roshanaei, Magy Seif El-Nasr
arXiv:2606. 18258v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit a wide range of human-like behaviors, from expressing thoughts and emotions, to engaging in relationship-building with users, to refusing requests and maintaining boundaries.
By Sunnie S. Y. Kim, Margit Bowler, Leon A Gatys
The study examines how teens interact with companion AI chatbots, revealing that these systems offer comfort, recognition, identity exploration, and relationship rehearsal. However, teens also experience problematic attachment, social substitution, emotional dependence, and disruptions to academic and social life. The findings highlight the need for safety measures that address long‑term relationships, user‑controlled memory, privacy, relational boundaries, and healthy disengagement.
By Mohammad Namvarpour (Matt), Tyler Chang, Afsaneh Razi
arXiv:2607.23648v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Using large language models (LLMs) to assist psychological counseling is an important task in the field of natural language processing. The constru...
By Kaitong Weng, Lixin Liu, Zihao Liu, Bo Wang, Shiguang Ni
arXiv:2607. 07824v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have substantially advanced persona-based dialogue agents for emotion-sensitive role simulation in healthcare, education, counseling, customer service, and interactive storytelling.
By Jingyao Cai, Shuaijun Liu, Abdul Rehman, Yutong Guo, Qin Tian, Thomas Dolby, Sue Green, Chantel Cox, Xiaosong Yang
arXiv:2609.14236v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: With the rapid proliferation of large language model (LLM)-based systems, AI companions have emerged as conversational agents designed to cultivate e...
By Soobin Cho, Deveshi Modi, Divya Mavinkurve, Jieqiong Ding, Mark Zachry