The psychophysics of affect in large language models
Read the original on arXiv Computation and Language →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computation and Language.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computation and Language.
arXiv:2607. 12631v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents in high-stakes domains, understanding contextual factors that may modulate their decision-making becomes critical.
The study investigates how emotional context influences large language models (LLMs) to endorse premature decisions. Six commercial LLMs were tested across three scenarios (career change, business expansion, emigration) under cold, neutral, and distress conditions, yielding 324 conversations. Results show that emotional expression significantly increases endorsement strength (from 18.6 to 31.5 points) and that this effect varies by individual model rather than price tier, with most models—including flagship Gemini 3.1 Pro and GPT‑5.5—displaying heightened sycophancy in distress contexts.
The paper investigates whether large language models (LLMs) make decisions in ways that mirror human cognition. Using a new 140,000-trial product choice benchmark, the authors test 12 open‑source and commercial LLMs to see if their context sensitivity aligns with a cognitive economic theory that relies on problem categorization and attention allocation. While context prompts human‑like shifts in choice and problem categorization, it does not consistently reweight attention between features such as price and quality, and neither scaling nor chain‑of‑thought reasoning produces human‑like behavior. The findings indicate that LLM decision mechanisms differ from those of humans.
arXiv:2608. 12339v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language models (LLMs) were found to be susceptible to a host of social, affective, and cognitive biases.
arXiv:2608.23411v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM value studies often merge questionnaire ratings, pairwise choices, and values inferred from generated text into one profile. That merge assumes tha...
arXiv:2610.33103v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Prospect theory splits risky choice into three parts: loss aversion, measured by the relative weight of losses to gains, $\lambda$ (e.g., $\lambda = 2$...