The study examines how emotions are represented across layers of large language models (LLMs) by probing eight 1B–9B open‑weight models on three datasets (Twitter, Reddit, autobiographical narratives). It finds that the optimal probing layer varies systematically with the dataset, moving from near‑input layers to deeper layers, and that targeted forward‑pass interventions on these layers degrade performance more than random interventions. Additionally, the selected layers transfer across datasets and emotion categories, and early‑exit representations from these layers outperform full‑depth exits by an average of 6.9 percentage points.
By Tian Fang, Ga\"el Guibon, Davide Buscaldi
The paper investigates the patterns of disagreement in emotion annotation by analyzing multilabel annotations from 1,677 sentence-level units of Hemingway’s *The Old Man and the Sea* and comparing them with individual-level annotations from BRIGHTER and GoEmotions. It identifies three recurring disagreement structures: systematic overlap of emotion categories, differences in label breadth and boundary treatment, and sparse participation or abstention that mimic disagreement. The study shows that hard aggregation obscures these patterns, while annotator vote-share representations preserve only marginal frequencies, and it proposes a vocabulary for describing disagreement structure.
By Emily \"Ohman, Anna Koufakou, Eugenia Diegoli
arXiv:2606. 26987v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent work identified emotion vectors in Claude Sonnet 4.
By Sinie van der Ben, Rapha\"el Baur, Yannick Metz, Mennatallah El-Assady
arXiv:2508.05880v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Understanding human emotions is central to user-facing AI applications, safety alignment, and the simulation of human behavior. As emotional...
By Sree Bhattacharyya, Evgenii Kuriabov, Lucas Craig, Tharun Dilliraj, Reginald B. Adams, Jr., Jia Li, James Z. Wang
arXiv:2608. 10810v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Emotion understanding in discourse requires reasoning beyond surface sentiment because speakers often convey affect through indirect, implicit, polite, ironic, or deliberately mismatched expressions.
By Zhenyan Zheng, Yunyao Zhang, Junxi Sheng, Junqing Yu, Zikai Song
The paper introduces DAN, a training‑free inference‑time framework that improves affective reasoning in multimodal large language models. It combines a Hierarchical Emotional Reasoning Chain (HERC) to better capture fine‑grained visual cues and a Contrastive Discriminative Visual Pruning (CDVP) module to isolate discriminative tokens for semantically similar emotions. Experiments show significant gains, notably a +10.47% improvement on the WebEmo25 benchmark with Qwen3‑VL‑8B‑Instruct.
By Cheng Ye, Weidong Chen, Zhaobo Qi, Beier Zhu, Zhendong Mao
arXiv:2606. 29068v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Text encoders are known for their utility in natural language processing, as they are able to efficiently compress inputs into dense vectors while preserving semantics.
By Fabio Ciani, Harald Schweiger, Emilia Parada-Cabaleiro, Markus Schedl
arXiv:2608. 03810v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models routinely describe socially salient targets, including political figures, countries, religions, organizations, historical events, and social groups, encoding affective framing alongside factual content: a target may appear favorable or threatening, calm or conflictual, powerful or vulnerable.
By Andrei Chetvergov, Alexander Evseev, Timofei Sivoraksha, Stepan Ukolov, Mikhail Solovev, Danil Sazanakov, Sergey Bolovtsov
arXiv:2610.27603v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Empathetic interaction involves two distinguishable capacities: representing another person's emotional state (cognitive empathy) and generating an app...
By Samhita Bollepally, Takashi Yamauchi, Marissa West
The paper analyzes how large language models (LLMs) maintain consistency when responding to their own generated text in emotionally charged conversations. By treating LLM-generated responses as queries and evaluating the subsequent replies, the study examines three false claim queries across extreme and moderate emotional intensities. Results show that commercial models (Claude‑3.5‑haiku, GPT4o‑mini) and a medium‑sized model (Mistral‑7B) perform below average and are especially vulnerable to false beliefs in moderate emotional contexts, with an attention‑score analysis revealing a shift from evaluative to generative priorities.
By Sneha Oram, Ojaswita Bhushan, Tejomay Kishor Padole, Suyash P. Awate, Pushpak Bhattacharyya
Chronoberg is a 250‑year English book corpus from Project Gutenberg, enriched with temporal annotations and affective lexicons (Valence‑Arousal‑Dominance). It allows researchers to track lexical semantic change over time and to evaluate how large language models handle sentiment and discriminatory language across different historical periods. The authors demonstrate that current LLMs struggle with diachronic shifts, underscoring the need for temporally aware training and evaluation pipelines.
By Niharika Hegde, Subarnaduti Paul, Lars-Joel Frey, Manuel Brack, Kristian Kersting, Martin Mundt, Patrick Schramowski
arXiv:2609.05806v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Emotion Recognition in Conversations (ERC) aims to identify speakers' emotions in multi-turn dialogue. Accurate emotion recognition can support a wide...
By Amir Ben Khalifa, Fanny Bezancon, Amine Trabelsi, Bessam Abdulrazak