August Håkan Nilsson
2025
Who We Are, Where We Are: Mental Health at the Intersection of Person, Situation, and Large Language Models
Nikita Soni
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August Håkan Nilsson
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Syeda Mahwish
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Vasudha Varadarajan
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H. Andrew Schwartz
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Ryan L. Boyd
Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology (CLPsych 2025)
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.