From Anger to Joy: How Nationality Personas Shape Emotion Attribution in Large Language Models

Mahammed Kamruzzaman, Abdullah Al Monsur, Gene Louis Kim, Anshuman Chhabra


Abstract
Emotions are a fundamental facet of human experience, varying across individuals, cultural contexts, and nationalities. Given the recent success of Large Language Models (LLMs) as role-playing agents, we examine whether LLMs exhibit emotional stereotypes when assigned nationality-specific personas. Specifically, we investigate how different countries are represented in pre-trained LLMs through emotion attributions and whether these attributions align with cultural norms. To provide a deeper interpretive lens, we incorporate four key cultural dimensions, namely Power Distance, Uncertainty Avoidance, Long-Term Orientation, and Individualism, derived from Hofstede’s cross-cultural framework. Our analysis reveals significant nationality-based differences, with emotions such as shame, fear, and joy being disproportionately assigned across regions. Furthermore, we observe notable misalignment between LLM-generated and human emotional responses, particularly for negative emotions, highlighting the presence of reductive and potentially biased stereotypes in LLM outputs.
Anthology ID:
2025.ijcnlp-long.4
Volume:
Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
December
Year:
2025
Address:
Mumbai, India
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Sakriani Sakti, Haofen Wang, Derek F. Wong, Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Biplab Banerjee, Asif Ekbal, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Dhirendra Pratap Singh
Venues:
IJCNLP | AACL
SIG:
Publisher:
The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
48–68
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.ijcnlp-long.4/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mahammed Kamruzzaman, Abdullah Al Monsur, Gene Louis Kim, and Anshuman Chhabra. 2025. From Anger to Joy: How Nationality Personas Shape Emotion Attribution in Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 48–68, Mumbai, India. The Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing and The Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
From Anger to Joy: How Nationality Personas Shape Emotion Attribution in Large Language Models (Kamruzzaman et al., IJCNLP-AACL 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.ijcnlp-long.4.pdf