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:
- 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)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.ijcnlp-long.4.pdf