Emergence of Hierarchical Emotion Organization in Large Language Models Article Swipe
Bo Zhao
,
Maya Okawa
,
Eric Bigelow
,
Rose Yu
,
Tomer Ullman
,
Ekdeep Singh Lubana
,
Hidenori Tanaka
·
YOU?
·
· 2025
· Open Access
·
· DOI: https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2507.10599
YOU?
·
· 2025
· Open Access
·
· DOI: https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2507.10599
As large language models (LLMs) increasingly power conversational agents, understanding how they model users' emotional states is critical for ethical deployment. Inspired by emotion wheels -- a psychological framework that argues emotions organize hierarchically -- we analyze probabilistic dependencies between emotional states in model outputs. We find that LLMs naturally form hierarchical emotion trees that align with human psychological models, and larger models develop more complex hierarchies. We also uncover systematic biases in emotion recognition across socioeconomic personas, with compounding misclassifications for intersectional, underrepresented groups. Human studies reveal striking parallels, suggesting that LLMs internalize aspects of social perception. Beyond highlighting emergent emotional reasoning in LLMs, our results hint at the potential of using cognitively-grounded theories for developing better model evaluations.
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- http://arxiv.org/abs/2507.10599
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Emergence of Hierarchical Emotion Organization in Large Language ModelsWork title
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2025Year of publication
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2025-07-12Full publication date if available
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Bo Zhao, Maya Okawa, Eric Bigelow, Rose Yu, Tomer Ullman, Ekdeep Singh Lubana, Hidenori TanakaList of authors in order
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.10599Publisher landing page
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0Total citation count in OpenAlex
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