Who We Are, Where We Are: Mental Health at the Intersection of Person, Situation, and Large Language Models

Nikita Soni, August Håkan Nilsson, Syeda Mahwish, Vasudha Varadarajan, H. Andrew Schwartz, Ryan L. Boyd


Abstract
Mental health is not a fixed trait but a dynamic process shaped by the interplay between individual dispositions and situational contexts. Building on interactionist and constructionist psychological theories, we develop interpretable models to predict well-being and identify adaptive and maladaptive self-states in longitudinal social media data. Our approach integrates person-level psychological traits (e.g., resilience, cognitive distortions, implicit motives) with language-inferred situational features derived from the Situational 8 DIAMONDS framework. We compare these theory-grounded features to embeddings from a psychometrically-informed language model that captures temporal and individual-specific patterns. Results show that our principled, theory-driven features provide competitive performance while offering greater interpretability. Qualitative analyses further highlight the psychological coherence of features most predictive of well-being. These findings underscore the value of integrating computational modeling with psychological theory to assess dynamic mental states in contextually sensitive and human-understandable ways.
Anthology ID:
2025.clpsych-1.27
Volume:
Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology (CLPsych 2025)
Month:
May
Year:
2025
Address:
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Editors:
Ayah Zirikly, Andrew Yates, Bart Desmet, Molly Ireland, Steven Bedrick, Sean MacAvaney, Kfir Bar, Yaakov Ophir
Venues:
CLPsych | WS
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
300–313
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.clpsych-1.27/
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Cite (ACL):
Nikita Soni, August Håkan Nilsson, Syeda Mahwish, Vasudha Varadarajan, H. Andrew Schwartz, and Ryan L. Boyd. 2025. Who We Are, Where We Are: Mental Health at the Intersection of Person, Situation, and Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology (CLPsych 2025), pages 300–313, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Who We Are, Where We Are: Mental Health at the Intersection of Person, Situation, and Large Language Models (Soni et al., CLPsych 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.clpsych-1.27.pdf