Cyndie Demeocq
2026
The Attachment Index: Auditing Attachment Language Cues and Relational Safety Risks in Human-LLM Dialogue
Cyndie Demeocq | Animesh Prasad | Marzieh Saeidi | Karen Goodall | Björn Ross
Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology (CLPsych 2026)
Cyndie Demeocq | Animesh Prasad | Marzieh Saeidi | Karen Goodall | Björn Ross
Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology (CLPsych 2026)
As conversational AI systems grow increasingly toward emotional support contexts, relational safety failures between users and chatbot remain under-measured. We present a psycholinguistic grounded framework for auditing attachment-relevant language cues. Our approach identifies when an LLM’s replies exhibit linguistic attachment cues and surface related patterns that may signal parasocial bonding, including anthropomorphism or over-dependence. We adapt the Adult Attachment Interview into two complementary, automatable lenses - attachment cues features and Gricean maxims - and combine them with psychologist-led annotation of multi-turn persona dialogues. Applying this framework, we observe that models can align with persona-intended attachment cue patterns. We also find that judge-LLMs alone are unreliable, highlighting the need for psychologist-in-the-loop evaluation. The 25 psychologist-led annotated conversations revealed risks, including boundary blurring and missed opportunities for appropriate referral or triage. These insights motivate attachment-aware safeguards - such as non-personification, boundary language, and explicit referral mechanisms - to reduce mis-attunement and over-attachment in LLM conversational settings.