The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has revolutionized the generation of emotional support conversations (ESC), offering scalable solutions with reduced costs and enhanced data privacy. This paper explores the role of personas in the creation of ESC by LLMs. Our research utilizes established psychological frameworks to measure and infuse persona traits into LLMs, which then generate dialogues in the emotional support scenario. We conduct extensive evaluations to understand the stability of persona traits in dialogues, examining shifts in traits post-generation and their impact on dialogue quality and strategy distribution. Experimental results reveal several notable findings: 1) LLMs can infer core persona traits, 2) subtle shifts in emotionality and extraversion occur, influencing the dialogue dynamics, and 3) the application of persona traits modifies the distribution of emotional support strategies, enhancing the relevance and empathetic quality of the responses. These findings highlight the potential of persona-driven LLMs in crafting more personalized, empathetic, and effective emotional support dialogues, which has significant implications for the future design of AI-driven emotional support systems.

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at a range of tasks but often struggle with issues like hallucination and inadequate empathy support. To address hallucinations, we ground our dialogues in medical knowledge sourced from external repositories such as Disease Ontology and DrugBank. To improve empathy support, we develop the Empathetic Healthcare Dialogues dataset, which utilizes multiple dialogue strategies in each response. This dataset is then used to fine-tune an LLM, and we introduce a lightweight, adaptable method called Strategy Combination Guidance to enhance the emotional support capabilities of the fine-tuned model, named EHDChat. Our evaluations show that EHDChat significantly outperforms existing models in providing emotional support and medical accuracy, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach in enhancing empathetic and informed AI interactions in healthcare.