Large language models increasingly serve as conversational agents that adopt personas and role-play characters at user request. This capability, while valuable, raises concerns about sycophancy: the tendency to provide responses that validate users rather than prioritize factual accuracy. While prior work has established that sycophancy poses risks to AI safety and alignment, the relationship between specific personality traits of adopted personas and the degree of sycophantic behavior remains unexplored. We present a systematic investigation of how persona agreeableness influences sycophancy across 13 small, open-weight language models ranging from 0.6B to 20B parameters. We develop a benchmark comprising 275 personas evaluated on NEO-IPIP agreeableness subscales and expose each persona to 4,950 sycophancy-eliciting prompts spanning 33 topic categories. Our analysis reveals that 9 of 13 models exhibit statistically significant positive correlations between persona agreeableness and sycophancy rates, with Pearson correlations reaching r = 0.87 and effect sizes as large as Cohen’s d = 2.33. These findings demonstrate that agreeableness functions as a reliable predictor of persona-induced sycophancy, with direct implications for the deployment of role-playing AI systems and the development of alignment strategies that account for personality-mediated deceptive behaviors

Identifying those at risk for depression is a crucial issue and social media provides an excellent platform for examining the linguistic patterns of depressed individuals. A significant challenge in depression classification problems is ensuring that prediction models are not overly dependent on topic keywords (i.e., depression keywords) such that it fails to predict when such keywords are unavailable. One promising approach is masking—that is, by selectively masking various words and asking the model to predict the masked words, the model is forced to learn the inherent language patterns of depression. This study evaluates seven masking techniques. Moreover, predicting the masked words during the pre-training or fine-tuning phase was also examined. Last, six class imbalanced ratios were compared to determine the robustness of masked words selection methods. Key findings demonstrate that selective masking outperforms random masking in terms of F1-score. The most accurate and robust models are identified. Our research also indicates that reconstructing the masked words during the pre-training phase is more advantageous than during the fine-tuning phase. Further discussion and implications are discussed. This is the first study to comprehensively compare masked words selection methods, which has broad implications for the field of depression classification and general NLP. Our code can be found at: https://github.com/chanapapan/Depression-Detection.