PsyJev: Psychological Analysis via System-1 Judgment
Organizations: State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Intelligence, School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China · Computer Science, Beijing Institute of Technology · School of Information Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China
Abstract
Self-disclosures on the Web support diverse psychological analyses, from recognizing expressed experiences to identifying symptom-relevant information. We study a shared, question-conditioned decision interface for this heterogeneous problem in content analysis. We organize PsyJudgeBench, comprising 13 annotated datasets and 82 questions across six psychological areas, while preserving source-specific criteria and masks for unobserved labels. We introduce PsyJev, a System-1 model that directly produces distributions over answers specified in each request. Joint supervised training establishes the shared judgment function, followed by Judgment-Anchored RLCD (JA-RLCD), which adapts logit-space reward optimization to heterogeneous psychological judgments through balanced supervision, selective retention of correct SFT predictions, and question-group reward optimization. The Qwen3.5-based 2B, 4B, and 9B models achieve 64.33, 66.21, and 67.56 average test F1, respectively. The 9B model exceeds the strongest external comparison by 2.54 points. Controlled 2B comparisons examine the training stages and anchored refinement. Further analyses examine question-conditioned judgment, inference cost, and probability quality, complemented by qualitative comparisons across models.
Figures & tables
| Depression / Anxiety | Self / Relationships | Stress / Distress | Cognition | Wellness | Crisis | Avg. | Inference | ||||||||
| Model | DepEmo | ANGST | PRIMATE | BDISen | IRF | LoST | LonXpl | SAD | CAMS | ThinkTrap | TherapQA | MultiWD | CRADLE | Avg. | Latency (ms) |
| Classification and Decision Models | |||||||||||||||
| MentalBERT | 52.09 | 43.38 | 27.03 | 8.61 | 65.00 | 17.10 | 77.43 | 66.60 | 38.46 | 0.00 | 7.82 | 37.88 | 0.00 | 33.95 | 0.46 |
| MentalRoBERTa | 60.74 | 58.21 | 33.11 | 5.13 | 75.45 | 31.55 | 80.66 | 67.87 | 39.06 | 0.00 | 10.51 | 38.69 | 0.00 | 38.54 | 0.46 |
| ModernBERT-large | 68.95 | 64.22 | 48.06 | 42.90 | 82.65 | 67.12 | 83.17 | 71.31 | 46.76 | 15.47 | 19.25 | 53.49 | 20.08 | 52.57 | 1.16 |
| GLiClass | 75.78 | 69.70 | 56.97 | 57.36 | 83.41 | 68.01 | 84.77 | 73.47 | 49.66 | 12.95 | 19.62 | 62.99 | 38.88 | 57.97 | 1.90 |
| Training configuration | Avg. F1 | F1 |
|---|---|---|
| (a) Training pipeline | ||
| SFT only | 60.68 | -3.65 |
| SFT continued CE | 61.72 | -2.61 |
| SFT adapted RLCD | 58.87 | -5.46 |
| SFT JA-RLCD (full) | 64.33 | +0.00 |
| (b) Refinement and matched controls | ||
| JA-RLCD vs. | All Q F1 | Difficult Q F1 | Improved Q (%) |
|---|---|---|---|
| SFT | +6.23 | +19.45 | 57.32 |
| Continued CE | +4.36 | +13.38 | 56.10 |
| Anchor only | +1.38 | +3.02 | 58.54 |
| Model | Both correct | Same-answer errors |
|---|---|---|
| GLiClass | 55.84 | 41.88 |
| Gemma-2-9B | 67.85 | 29.84 |
| Qwen3.5-4B answer | 66.24 | 31.95 |
| PsyJev-4B | 70.06 | 28.09 |
| Model | F1 | NLL | Brier | ECE |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MentalBERT | 33.95 | 0.659 | 0.3619 | 5.82 |
| MentalRoBERTa | 38.54 | 0.620 | 0.3405 | 4.75 |
| ModernBERT-large | 52.57 | 0.580 | 0.3089 | 5.75 |
| GLiNER2 | 59.01 | 0.544 | 0.2869 | 4.95 |
| FLAN-T5-XL | 52.88 | 0.588 | 0.3220 | 6.41 |
| PsyJev-4B | 66.21 | 0.536 | 0.2777 | 4.58 |
| Gold | GLiClass | Gemma-2-9B | Qwen3.5-4B Answer SFT | PsyJev-4B SFT | PsyJev-4B JA-RLCD |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A. Co-occurring emotions DepressionEmo : Multi-label emotion recognition | |||||
| “ Very lonely in high school, then very lonely in the military. Eventually I was able to have a group of friends for a while and it filled the void , but I ditched them, I get lonely now and again ” | |||||
| Emptiness, Loneliness | Loneliness | Emptiness, Loneliness | Emptiness, Loneliness, Sadness | Emptiness, Loneliness, Sadness | Emptiness, Loneliness |
| Interpretation. PsyJev recovers Emptiness and Loneliness without the additional Sadness label predicted by the answer model and SFT. | |||||
| B. Competing distress cues CAMS : Primary distress reason | |||||
| “i have a part-time job and struggle to even get through 4 hour shifts . so i don’t make enough money to do anything but attend work basically and smoke some cigarettes. […] i’m also struggling with a severely broken heart from an on-and-off 10 year thing” | |||||
| Scale | Model / training | F1 (%) |
| 2B | Qwen3.5 answer-SFT | 74.32 |
| PsyJev SFT | 73.91 | |
| PsyJev JA-RLCD | 77.76 | |
| 4B | Qwen3.5 answer-SFT | 76.53 |
| PsyJev SFT | 77.87 | |
| PsyJev JA-RLCD | 78.70 |
Appendix figures & tables8 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Source | Q | Train | Val. | Test |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Depression / anxiety | ||||
| DepressionEmo | 8 | 4,219 | 907 | 911 |
| ANGST | 2 | 6,769 | 763 | 2,872 |
| PRIMATE | 9 | 1,593 | 207 | 203 |
| BDI-Sen | 21 | 1,759 | 261 | 503 |
| Self / relationships | ||||
| Source | Registry instruction and legal answers |
|---|---|
| DepressionEmo | Does the author express sadness in this post? Answers: no; yes |
| PRIMATE | Does this post provide enough information to answer the PHQ-9 item about Feeling down depressed or hopeless? Judge answerability, not whether the symptom is present. Answers: no; yes |
| BDI-Sen | Does this sentence provide information relevant to the BDI-II symptom Sadness? Judge the source relevance label, not severity or symptom presence. Answers: no; yes |
| SAD | What is the primary stressor category expressed in this sentence? Answers: Financial Problem; Other; Everyday Decision Making; Emotional Turmoil; School; Family Issues; Social Relationships; Work; Health, Fatigue, or Physical Pain |
| Cross-partition check | Full text | 512 tokens |
|---|---|---|
| Exact normalized matches | 0 (0.00%) | 0 (0.00%) |
| Jaccard , shingles | 0 | 0 |
| Containment ( characters) | 0 | 0 |
| Source | Brier | ECE (%) |
|---|---|---|
| ANGST | 0.4436 | 18.54 |
| BDI-Sen | 0.1499 | 1.85 |
| CAMS | 0.5408 | 4.33 |
| CRADLE | 0.0644 | 0.76 |
| DepressionEmo | 0.2327 | 1.06 |
| IRF | 0.1895 | 3.97 |
| Model / training | F1 (%) |
|---|---|
| GLiClass | 66.56 |
| GLiNER2 | 70.94 |
| FLAN-T5-XL | 74.84 |
| Llama-3.2-3B | 78.00 |
| Phi-4-mini | 73.27 |
| Gemma-3-4B | 78.26 |
| Model | Both correct | Same answer | Both wrong |
|---|---|---|---|
| GLiClass | 55.84 | 41.88 | 2.28 |
| Gemma-2-9B | 67.85 | 29.84 | 2.31 |
| Qwen3.5-4B answer | 66.24 | 31.95 | 1.82 |
| PsyJev-4B SFT | 63.55 | 34.37 | 2.09 |
| PsyJev-4B | 70.06 | 28.09 | 1.84 |
| Case | Answer probability / margin | SFT | JA-RLCD |
|---|---|---|---|
| A | Emptiness | 0.752 | 0.825 |
| A | Loneliness | 0.999 | 1.000 |
| A | Sadness | 0.571 | 0.445 |
| B | Jobs and careers | 0.303 | 0.402 |
| B | Relationship | 0.406 | 0.389 |
| B | -0.103 | +0.013 |
Computational Psycholinguistics
Computational psycholinguistics models how people learn, produce, and understand language using formal theories, algorithms, and behavioral data.
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