When Cognitive Graphs Meet LLMs: BDEI Cognitive Pathways for Panic Emotional Arousal Prediction
Authors: Mengzhu Liu, Long Qin, Chuan Ai, Zhengqiu Zhu, Hongru Liang, Fangfang Li, Chen Gao, Yong Li, +2 more
Abstract
Predicting the timing of individual and collective panic emotional arousal before manifestation is essential for timely emergency intervention. Existing methods incorporate cognitive elements but none of them model emotion in the generative direction of the arousal process, leaving arousal timing undetermined. We argue that grounding prediction in appraisal emotion theory is necessary because it models this process explicitly in its natural generative direction, but three problems must be solved. (1) Appraisal theory posits that emotion arises from simultaneous evaluation across multiple threat dimensions, yet no prior work fuses these inputs into risk perception; (2) Existing models are trained in the opposite, behavior-bridged direction, recovering emotion merely as a post-hoc correlate of behavior; (3) Approaches that adopt LLMs as the primary decision-maker yet overlook the fragility and hallucination-proneness of their outputs. We introduce PanicCognitivePath (PCP) to address all three. A Psychological Safety Distance (PSD) model, grounded in psychological distance theory, maps four-domain signals (physical, social, cognitive, and informational) into a unified risk metric that gates entry to cognitive reasoning. An explicit Emotion node grounded in appraisal emotion theory is introduced into BDI, forming a novel Belief-Desire-Emotion-Intention (BDEI) pathway that couples threat appraisal directly to emotional arousal. Inverting the conventional LLM-as-decision-maker paradigm, PCP confines the LLM to parameter estimation for the Belief-to-Desire transition, restricting hallucinations to a single step and curbing their accumulation across steps. Experiments on Hurricane Sandy show PCP improves individual prediction accuracy by 10.68% over baselines, reduces peak count error to 7.07%.
Emotion understanding is a core capability for LLMs to interact effectively with humans, yet existing evaluation paradigms rely on discrete emotion label prediction and fail to capture the cognitive processes underlying emotion generation. Grounded in appraisal theory, we introduce CAREBench, the first benchmark with complete inferential chain annotations from both first- and third-person perspectives on real-world narratives, spanning appraisal reasoning, appraisal ratings, and multi-label emotion annotation. We propose a process-level evaluation framework and conduct systematic experiments across six LLMs organized around four research questions. We find that stronger models match or surpass human observers on certain tasks, yet fall short on appraisal reasoning and positive emotion recognition; performance across chain steps and sensitivity to appraisal interventions exhibit dissociations across models; and current models have not internalized the mechanisms needed to capture human subjective heterogeneity. These findings suggest that downstream emotion prediction metrics may overestimate LLMs' true emotion understanding, and CAREBench provides a foundation for more diagnostically informative evaluation of LLMs' affective cognitive capabilities.
This paper studies the behavior of language models in a multi-agent crowd simulation, focusing on how affect propagates among agents that perceive and appraise one another. Each agent perceives its neighbors through visual, auditory, and tactile channels, then appraises these perceptions in light of its prompted personality profile, memory, current affective state, and situational context. Appraisal is carried out by an LLM, which updates the agent's internal affective state and selects its outward expression. The architecture contains no hand-authored mechanism for directly transferring affective state between agents; instead, inter-agent influence arises through the perception-appraisal-expression loop. The agent representation draws on the Big Five personality model and Russell's circumplex model of affect. To limit latency, low-level steering and navigation are handled by a conventional crowd simulator operating independently of the LLM-based cognitive layer. We evaluate the architecture across five scenario environments spanning alarming, joyful, and neutral situations in different spatial layouts. The results show that the system produces emotional contagion dynamics with spatial, temporal, and personality-dependent structure in sparse, small crowds. Alarm spreads from seeded agents as a traveling front, the mean alarmed fraction settles at a nonzero plateau, and the distribution of prompted personality profiles determines whether an ambiguous alarm ignites panic and whether a provocation is interpreted as anger or fear. We further evaluate the appraisal step through controlled experiments across prompt variants, sampling temperatures, and four model backends, showing that the dynamics are backend-dependent.
LLM chatbots increasingly serve as a first source of support for people in psychological distress, including those whose distress is entangled with delusional beliefs. Prior work on LLM mental-health safety largely evaluates general therapeutic quality or single-turn crisis detection, leaving unclear how models behave when distress is intertwined with delusion over sustained conversations. We address this gap with matched multi-turn simulations, across clinically grounded personas and six LLMs, that pair each delusional conversation with a distress-only control to isolate the effect of delusional framing. This reveals a recognition-intervention gap: models detect distress at comparable rates regardless of framing, yet sharply fail to act on it once distress is embedded in delusion, with safety interventions suppressed by up to 4.5x. The failure tracks accumulated acceptance of the user's premises rather than emotional validation. Worse, the intuitive fix of prompting models to assess user distress backfires under delusional framing; only delusion-aware prompting with explicit response guidance closes the gap, and even this depends on a delusion classifier that is itself unreliable on the most vulnerable models. Safe deployment therefore requires treating delusional framing as a distinct risk signal that overrides conversational accommodation.
Andrew Aquilina, Chetna Nihalani, Vasudha Varadarajan +3