From Chatbots to Confidants: A Cross-Cultural Study of LLM Adoption for Emotional Support

The expression of emotions that serve social purposes, such as asserting independence or fostering interdependence, is central to human interactions and varies systematically across cultures. As LLMs are increasingly used to simulate human behavior in culturally nuanced interactions, it is important to understand whether they faithfully capture human patterns of social emotion expression. When LLM responses are not culturally aligned, their utility is compromised -- particularly when users assume they are interacting with a culturally attuned interlocutor, and may act on advice that proves inappropriate in their cultural context. We present a psychologically informed evaluation framework of cross-cultural social emotion expression in LLMs. Using a human study comparing European American and Latin American participants' expression of engaging and disengaging emotions, we evaluate six frontier LLMs on their ability to reflect culturally differentiated patterns for expressing social emotions. We find systematic misalignment between model and human behavior: all models express engaging emotions more than disengaging ones, with particularly stark differences observed for the generally well-represented European American persona. We further highlight that LLM responses are highly concentrated and deterministic, failing to capture the diversity of human responses in expressing social emotions. Our ablation analyses reveal that these patterns are robust to sampling temperatures, partially sensitive to prompt language, and dependent on the response elicitation format. Together, our findings highlight limitations in how current LLMs represent the interaction of cultural and emotional axes, particularly when expressing social emotions, with direct implications for their deployment in cross-cultural affective contexts.

Prior clinical psychology research shows that Western individuals with depression tend to report psychological symptoms, while Eastern individuals report somatic ones. We test whether Large Language Models (LLMs), which are increasingly used in mental health, reproduce these cultural patterns by prompting them with Western or Eastern personas. Results show that LLMs largely fail to replicate the patterns when prompted in English, though prompting in major Eastern languages (i.e., Chinese, Japanese, and Hindi) improves alignment in several configurations. Our analysis pinpoints two key reasons for this failure: the models' low sensitivity to cultural personas and a strong, culturally invariant symptom hierarchy that overrides cultural cues. These findings reveal that while prompt language is important, current general-purpose LLMs lack the robust, culture-aware capabilities essential for safe and effective mental health applications.

LLMs are increasingly used for interpersonal advice and as tools for studying social behavior across languages and cultures. A common shortcut for eliciting language- or culture-related variation is to ask a model to answer as a native speaker. We test whether this native-speaker persona reproduces the outputs obtained when models instead generate advice in the target language and translate the response back into English. Using 600 interpersonal advice questions across 13 languages and eight LLMs, we compare native-language generation followed by translation (NL) with native-speaker persona prompting (NP), measuring linguistic style, behavioral scaffolding, and forced-choice action recommendations. We find that NP and NL are not interchangeable. Compared to NL, NP often increases lexical social cues, including affiliation and positive tone, while reducing qualities such as concreteness and social attunement; NP also provides less actionable scaffolding in open-ended advice. In forced-choice scenarios, NP changes which action the model selects, favoring confrontation over redirection, with effect sizes varying across languages, topics, and models. Our results show that cross-lingual elicitation strategy is a consequential methodological choice that can change both how advice is framed and which actions models recommend.