@inproceedings{de-grandi-etal-2025-emotional,
    title = "The Emotional Spectrum of {LLM}s: Leveraging Empathy and Emotion-Based Markers for Mental Health Support",
    author = "De Grandi, Alessandro  and
      Ravenda, Federico  and
      Raballo, Andrea  and
      Crestani, Fabio",
    editor = "Zirikly, Ayah  and
      Yates, Andrew  and
      Desmet, Bart  and
      Ireland, Molly  and
      Bedrick, Steven  and
      MacAvaney, Sean  and
      Bar, Kfir  and
      Ophir, Yaakov",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology (CLPsych 2025)",
    month = may,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Albuquerque, New Mexico",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.clpsych-1.3/",
    pages = "26--43",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-226-8",
    abstract = "The increasing demand for mental health services has highlighted the need for innovative solutions, particularly in the realm of psychological conversational AI, where the availability of sensitive data is scarce. In this work, we explored the development of a system tailored for mental health support with a novel approach to psychological assessment based on explainable emotional profiles in combination with empathetic conversational models, offering a promising tool for augmenting traditional care, particularly where immediate expertise is unavailable. Our work can be divided into two main parts, intrinsecaly connected to each other. First, we present RACLETTE, a conversational system that demonstrates superior emotional accuracy compared to considered benchmarks in both understanding users' emotional states and generating empathetic responses during conversations, while progressively building an emotional profile of the user through their interactions. Second, we show how the emotional profiles of a user can be used as interpretable markers for mental health assessment. These profiles can be compared with characteristic emotional patterns associated with different mental disorders, providing a novel approach to preliminary screening and support."
}