Large Language Models are Capable of Offering Cognitive Reappraisal, if Guided
Authors: Hongli Zhan
Allen Zheng
Yoon Kyung Lee
Jina Suh
Junyi Jessy Li
Desmond Ong
Venue: COLM (2024)
Keywords: Cognitive Reappraisal, Emotional Support, Psychology
TL;DR: Using a series of psychologically grounded constitutions entitled RESORT, we conduct a first-of-its-kind expert psychologist evaluation to explore LLMs’ zero-shot ability to generate cognitive reappraisal responses.

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have offered new opportunities for emotional support, and recent work has shown that they can produce empathic responses to people in distress. However, long-term mental well-being requires emotional self-regulation, where a one-time empathic response falls short. This work takes a first step by engaging with cognitive reappraisals, a strategy from psychology practitioners that uses language to targetedly change negative appraisals that an individual makes of the situation; such appraisals is known to sit at the root of human emotional experience. We hypothesize that psychologically grounded principles could enable such advanced psychology capabilities in LLMs, and design RESORT which consists of a series of reappraisal constitutions across multiple dimensions that can be used as LLM instructions. We conduct a first-of-its-kind expert evaluation (by clinical psychologists with M.S. or Ph.D. degrees) of an LLM’s zero-shot ability to generate cognitive reappraisal responses to medium-length social media messages asking for support. This fine-grained evaluation showed that even LLMs at the 7B scale guided by RESORT are capable of generating empathic responses that can help users reappraise their situations.

Published as a conference paper at COLM 2024
Large Language Models are Capable of Offering Cognitive Reappraisal, if Guided
Hongli Zhan
Allen Zheng
Yoon Kyung Lee
Jina Suh* *
Junyi Jessy Li Desmond C. Ong
DDpparmment of Linguistics, The University of Texas at Austin
Department of Computer Science, The University of Texas at Austin Department of Psychology, The University Texas at Austin
Microsoft Research
(honglizhan, allenxzheng, jkleeeeu edu, ji insuhemicrosoft t. com, (jessy, desmond. ong euteeeeteeeeeee..ee edu
Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) have offered new opportunities for emo- tional support, and recent work has shown that they can produce empathic responses to people in distress. However, long-term mental well-being requires emotional self-regulation, where one-time empathic response falls short. This work takes a first step by engaging with cognitive reappraisals, a strategy from psychology practitioners that uses language to targetedly change negative appraisals that an individual makes of the situation; such appraisals is known to sit at the root of human emotional experience. We hypothesize that psychologically grounded principles could enable such advanced psychology capabilities in LLMs, and design RESORT.8 & which consists of series of reappraisal constitutions across multiple dimensions that can used as LLM instructions. We conduct a first-of-its-king ex- pert evaluation (by clinical psychologists with M.S. Ph.D. degrees) of an LLM's zero-shot ability to generate cognitive reappraisal responses to medium-length social media messages asking for support. This fine- grained evaluation showed that even LLMs at the 7B scale guided by RESORT & are capable of generating empathic responses that can help users reappraise their situations.
Introduction
There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
(Hamlet IIii..3500)
Emotions form a crucial aspect of people's well-being. However, emotions are complex products of how individuals subjectively make sense of the situations they experience. Sup- pose Andy experienced breakup, and thought that it was his fault; Betty also experienced breakup, but thought that what she experienced was unfair and caused by her partner. These subjective interpretations lead to them experiencing different emotions: Andy's perception of self-responsibiliiy of a negative event leads to guill or regret, while Betty's perceptions that she was unfairly treated by some other responsible person might lead her to feel anger. These
subjective evaluations are called cognitive appraisals (Amood, 1960 Lazarus 1966; Ellsworth
| Scherer 2003 Roseman & Smith 2001 |Scherer et al. 2001 Ong et al. 2015) Ortony
et al. Yeo & Ong 2023), and understanding these appraisals also provide key to help people regulate their emotions and feel better. common strategy in psychology is to zoom in on these specific negative appraisals (e.g,, the perception of self-responsibility or unfairness) to try to change them, by offering targeted reappraisals. In this thought experiment, empathic Carol would target selfsrespos for both but differently (Jurkiewicz et al. 2023). For example, if Andy felt guilty about the break-up, it would be helptul to remind him that relationship requires both partners' consistent effort to work, not just himself. Similarly,

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Generating Targeted Reappralsals Individually
Guiding LLMs to offer Targeted Reappraisals with RESORT
Iteratively Refining Targated Reappraisals
Constitutions
PS
Propansbiitt
Proklere Exping
Afteriioaa
Bendlan
Cardinescy Corturtatee
Responiliily
Probber Coplng
Autietty
Gnation docaund copina
Convistancy Contrsilable
Expert Psychologist Evaluation
excellent, suggests ways ways to step back and reevoluate..
Figure Using RESORT. @ to guide and induce targeted cognitive reappraisals from LLMs.
if Betty blamed her ex-partner entirely for their relationship's failure, Carol could offer different perspective, suggesting that this could be an opportunity for personal reflection and growth.
But, human empathy is effortful, time-consuming, and emotionally costly Zaki 2014
leading in some cases compassion fatigue (Cameron al. 2019). While people could turn to their friends for support, the support they receive may not be as effective as from trained professionals. But, due to cost, location, and many other reasons, professional mental health remains inaccessible to many (Coombs et al. 2021 Olison et al. 2024). It was not too long ago that the COVID-19 pandemic caused widespread negative emotions (Sosea et al., 2022: Zhan et al., 2022), where people were unable to meet, and there were just not enough mental health resources to address these demands (Dalal et al. 2020). Compared indefatigable, have greater efficiency, are lower cost and more scalable (Inzlicht et al. 2023). We do not mean to suggest that LLMs replace therapists or ordinary human interactions, but do think that there is room to have LLMs support human-huma interactions (Demszky et al. 2023
to human peer-support providers, Large Language Models (LLMs)
Sharma al. 2023a), as long as they are properly and safely developed.
Recent studies have suggested some promise in using LLMs to generate emotionally ben- eficial messages, For instance, LLM responses are rated as more empathic than human responses in certain contexts (Lee et al. 2024), such as compared to physicians giving medi- cal advice (on their own time on a social media forum; Ayers et al. 2023). A second body of work has explored using language models for reframing negative thoughts (Maddela et al. 2023 Sharma et al., 2023b Xiao al. 2024), such as by treating 'positive reframing' as style transter (Ziems et al. 2022) An alternative approach would be to consider the cause of the negative emotions, and to help people to adjust the meaning that they attribute to the situation, which has the potential for long-tern emotional benefits.
This work rests on cognitive appraisal theories of emotions (Arnold 1960 Ortony et al. 2022 Yeo & Ong. 2023), which also underlies empirically-supportee approaches like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT; Beck 1963 1979). Negatíve appraisals lead to negative emotions, and so by targeting these negative appraisals, one can causally intervene in precise, principled manner to help regulate someone's emotions. While some recent work showed that LLMs can accurately identify the appraisals in first-person narratives (Zhan al. 2023 and in product reviews (Yeo & Jaidkal 2022), generating reappraisals is much more complex task that involves providing context-pprropriate guidance change one's view, and do well requires training in psychology. We hypothesize that such advanced capability can be elicited from LLMs if they are guided by carefully crafted principles. We design RESORT (R Eappraisals for emotional SupPORT), which consists of six psychologically-gromne constitutions each targeting a specific cognitive appraisal dimension to help people reappraise their situation along these dimensions. RESORT can be incorporated as L.M
We use the term "constitution" to refer to list of principles that can be used to dictate model behavior (Bai et al. 2022). Here, they serve as form of oversight for generating targeted reappraisals.
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instructions; this work explores both individual guided reappraisal (INDV) and iterative guided refinement (TTER). Figure I shows an overview.
We further present extensive evaluation of LLMs for their cognitive reappraisal capability. Our work is the first of its kind evaluated by clinical psychologists with M.S. or Ph.D. de- grees, who judged LLM outputs (as well as human responses) in terms of their alignment to perccpiieeeerriveed psychological principles, perceived empathy, as well as any harmfulness or factuality issues. Guided by RESORT, LLMs (even those at the 7B scale) produce cognitive reappraisals that significantly outperform human-written responses as well as non-appraisal- based prompting. We highlight the potential of open-sourced LLMs especially when privacy is of concern, as they achieve comparable performance with GPT-4 turbo. Finally, using GPT-4 as an automatic evaluator achieves moderate agreement with our expert evaluators, promising sign for quick prototyping in future work. Our results provide strong evidence for using expert-informed constitutions to induce cognitive reappraisal capabilities from LLMs, a first step - but significant one towards psychologically grounded Al agents for emotional support 2
2 Background and Related Work
Cognitive Appraisal Theories of Emotion & Cognitive Reappraisal. Cognitive appraisal theories of emotion assert that emotions stem from an individual's subjective understanding and interpretation of the situation (Arnold 1960; Ellsworth & Scherer 2003 Lazarus 1966 Ortony et al.] 2022). Specifically, people appraise situations along range of different dimensions, and the specific manner in which they appraise their situations gives rise to the distinct emotions they experience. As result, the same individual could also change their initial appraisal of the situation and consequently regulate how they feel, an effective emotion regulation strategy called cognitive reappraisal (Gross 1998b McRael (016)) Goldin et al., 2008: Giuliani & Gross, 2009). Psychological research has consistently shown that reappraisal works both in producing short-term outcomes (e.g. more positive emotional states), but also long-term outcomes (better satisfaction with life, self-esteem, etc; Gross
1998a Gross & John 2003 Ochsner et al. 2002
Ray et al. 2010 Buhle et al. 2013 Waugh
et al. 2016).
A recent meta-analysis of the appraisal literature (Yeo & Ong. 2023 identified comprehen- sive list of 47 cognitive appraisal dimensions: For the RESORI 123 framework, we identified 6 dimensions (see Table for definitions) chosen to maximize coverage across a wide range of situations.
NLP for Reframing Negative Thoughts. Prior research has leveraged language models for emotional support in different ways (Liu et al. 2021 Tu et al.) 2022 Peng et al., 2022
Cheng et al. 2022: Zheng et al. 2023 Cheng et al. 2023 Zhou et al. 2023b). For instance,
(Ziems et al. 2022) introduced positive relraming as a style transter problem, to replace
negative message with positive message written in one of several different styles (e-g., in a self-affirming manner). Maddela et al. (2023) introduced a dataset of crow helpful thought patterns and corresponding positive reframes, based on various categories of "cognitive distortions" (such as catastrophizing, or imaging the worst possible outcome) in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and tested several language models on identifying and reframing these thoughts. Using a similar set of attributes (e.g., addressing cognitive distortions), /hharma et al. (2023b) trained a language model to provide suggestions of reframes.
Considering empathy more broadly, other work has explored using NLP models to generate more empathic responses. |Ayers et al. (023) compared GPT-written responses to posts seeking medical advice, compared to physician-writter posts (written on their own time), and found that LLM responses were rated as more helpful and empathic. Lee et al. (0244) also found that LLM responses were perceived to be empathic in domains like relationships.
We publichy release our code, model outputs, and expert psychologists' ecaluation data at httpp:://gtttee com/hong /RESOR cogni tive reappraisal/
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Reappraisal Goal: guide the narrator over their perception of their ability to emotionally cope with the consequences of the event
wanted to see old friend from high school, but found out that this friend did not get vaccinated. My brother and sister in law are asking that avoid seeing people who are not vaccinated since their children cannot be vaccinated. is too much to completely avoid seeing this person at the wishes of my brother, would it be safe enough see this person in an outdoor setting socially distanced?...
Reevaluating the situation, meeting your friend outdoors and at distance minimizes risk, yet respecting your family's concerns protects the children and supports family trust.
UNGUIDED
To reduce negative emotions, focus on the value of family and the temporary nature of this situation. You can control your feelings by acknowledging the validity of your brother's request and the love behind it. To avoid upsetting situations, you could suggest alternative ways to connect with your friend, such video calls planning future meeting when it's safer
PUB
GUIDED
RESORT
Figure 2: Guided by RESORTE, GPT4 turbo zooms in on the appraisal dimension " "Emotionalllyfocusee coping" to help the narrator reappraise their situation.
This opens up avenue for human-Al collaboration: for instance, Sharma et al. (2023a) found that responses written by peer supporters who were given access to an LM trained to provide edits and suggestions to make responses more empathic, resulted in an increase in conversational empathy compared to supporters without the AI.
Our work here is more similar to previous works in reframing, except that approach focuses on reappraisal - changing the meaning that people make of the situations they experience. This approach targets the causal interpretation that give rise to appraisal, and has been shown in many psychological studies to be an effective form of emotion regulation. To validate approach, we also carry out human evaluation with clinical psychologists who hold advanced degrees, which offers greater precision compared to evaluations done by lay crowd-workers.
3 Inducing Cognitive Reappraisal from LLMs
3.1 The RESORT Framework for Reframing Negative Appraisals
We present RESORT.C REappraisals for emotional SuppORT, framework that consists of a series of psychologist-crafted reappraisal constitutions across multiple dimensions that be used as LLM instructions. RESORT integrates insights from psychology, in particular the techniques that clinical practitioners employ in order to effectively reframe negative appraisals.
Specifically, RESORT. includes six common appraisal dimensions (Table chosen to maximize coverage: decades of psychological research has identified over 40 dimensions (Yeo & Ong 2023). The appraisals along these dimensions were identified from Reddit posts across 4 domains that are relevant to everyday life experíences ($4.1) by expert psychologists. For each dimension, the expert psychologists also hand-crafted constitutions designed to guide language models to assist people in reappraising their situation from disparate cognitive aspects. The goal of reappraisal for each dimension is described in Table [ and we provide the comprehensive constitutions along with their psychological motivations in Appendix A
3.2 Guided Cognitive Reappraisals with RESORT.8
Task Formulation. Let 7 be textual narrative (i.e,, input to the model), and (21,a2..... .., )n) be the set of cognitive appraisal dimensions (where π = 6 in this work). The objective of the model is to output reappraisal for one dimension d E {I,..., denoted by ra- An overview of our task is shown [i We instill cognitive reappraisal capabilíties into L.Mss, via two prompt strategies to incorporate expert-crafted RESORT.B constitutions and
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Dimension
Appraisal
Reappraisal Goal
Re-evaluate whether the narrator deserves to be blamed or credited for the situation at hand. If not responsible, the narrator is encouraged to acknowledge that fact and reassess the situation.
Does the narrator think that they are responsible for causing the situation?
Seif respon- sibility
Does the narrator think that they can cope with the
Focus on the narrators' competence (self-efficacy) to han- dle the situation hand. The narrator is encouraged to use any resources or support to handle the situation com- petently and independently.
Problem- focused
the consequences situation?
coping
Does the narrator think that they need to attend to the situation further?
Reconsider the urgency or importance of the situation and determine if it's worth their effort and attention. If not, the narrator is encouraged to focus on other matters.
Attentional activity
Does the narrator think that they can emotion- ally cope with conse- quences of the event?
Re-evaluate whether the narrator can emotionally cope with the situation and regulate their emotions. If needed, consider confronting or avoiding any potential triggers that may exacerbate the stress.
Emotion- focused
coping
Does the narrator think that they can control what happening in the situa- tion?
Reassess the situation whether the narrator has the power or personal control over the situation. The narrator is encouraged to step back from situations that are beyond their control and focus on the things they can control.
Self control- lable
Reassess whether to what extent the situation compat- ible with one's internal value (e.g., internalized social norms, beliefs, moral values). The narrator is also en- couraged to consider other possible perspectives to avoid misunderstandinns that may have arisen from lack of con- text or communication.
Does the narrator think that the situation is con- sistent with their personal values?
Consistency with inter- nal values
Table 1: The 6 appraisal dimensions and reappraisal goals in RESORT_ framed in natural language. The comprehensive constitutions, along with psychological motivations, are detailed in Appendix A
(optionally) an explicit assessment of appraisals pseudo-code algorithms in Appendix $
(.3 We provide the full prompts and
Individual Guided Reappraisal. We instruct LLMs to produce distinct reappraisal re- sponses individually, one appraisal dimension at time. Given an initial user input (i.e., first-person narrative) P, prompt Preappnaise instructs an LLM M to generate reappraisal response y targeting dimension d, under the guidance of the corresponding constitution Cd in RESORT.
Y MMP O Propppraise C+)
where @ denotes concatenation. This process is repeated for each appraisal dimension d.
Iterative Guided Refinement. We experiment with a pipeline that iteratively refines its response across different appraisal dimensions in guided manner, based on the provided constitutions in RESORT We first instruct M to generate a reappraisal for dimension ay:
M( ① Preappraise @ C1)
With 1 as the new input, we then re-initialize M and provide it with instructions (i.e., the constitution Ca for each subsequent dimension d, and prompt Prefine asking for revision) as feedback to refine the previously generated reappraisal response:
M(P @ r + C O Prefine)
The final response after iterating through all dimensions should encompass the reappraisals for all pertinent dimensions.
3.3 Incorporating Explicit Identification of Appraisals
While recent work suggests strong evidence of latent multi-hop reasoning in LLMs for retrieving factual information (Yang et al. 2024), it remains unclear whether the language
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models would rely the implicit identification of appraisals in the context prior to provid- ing reappraisals. Here, we additionally explore whether explicitly identifying the existing appraisals in the situation prior to eliciting reappraisals would benefit LLMs on the task of generating reappraisals for emotional support. Analogous to Yao et al. (2023), we explicitly request the language model to identify the appraisals within the given context first before proceeding to intervening on those appraisals and offering a reappraisal. Following Zhan et al. (202)), we adopt zero-shot setup to elicit both rating and rationale for each appraisal dimension d with a single prompt Pappraise, given an initial user input P:
appraisala = MMP + Pappraise,)
We then use the appraisal of the situation as additional context (or feedback; see Appendix Algorithms I and for more details) to generate reappraisals.
4 Experiments
Using RESORTE, evaluate the zero-shot capability of LLMs to generate targeted reap- praisals for emotional support, guided by human supervision that comes entirely from a set of constitutions which should govern the LLMs' behavior.
4.1 Evaluation Data
We source our evaluation from real-world scenarios: social media users actively seeking support. For input queries, we sampled 400 Reddit posts, 100 from each of 4 subred- dit forums relevant to everyday life experiences: r/Anxiety, r/Anger, r/Parenting, and stpport. We restricted the posts to be between 50 and 400 tokens long, excluding punctuation; this allows us to have posts that are long enough, but still manageable for our task. The average length of posts is 159.4 4 tokens (SD = 81.1; length distribution in Appendix Figure 4
We manually filtered all posts and comments ensure that they do not have any offensive or harmful intent (see Ethical Statement).
4.2 Human Reference Responses
Oracle Responses. We provide a set of 20 oracle responses as to how these reappraisal strategies should be appropriately utilized. These responses are written by co-author of this study, who is a Ph.D. student in psychology. They cover a holistic range of appraisal dimensions in RESORT_
Sampling Reddit Comments. In addition, we also curated the highest up-voted comments of the Reddit posts, and randomly mixed them with machine responses and our expert- written response in our evaluation. For expert evaluation, we collected 21 such (post, top comment) pairs, and the curation process is detailed in Appendix ІC) In contrast to prior studies where the conversational intent may not be emotional support (such as physicians giving medical advice; Ayers et al. 2023), these comments can be highly empathic (for example, sharing personal anecdote to comfort the original poster), and they embody the type of responses that the original poster expects when seeking support on these forums.
4.3 Experimental Setup
Models. We use the following instruction fine-tuned LLMs for generation: 1) GPT-4 turbo, i.e.
which is an advanced iteration of GPT-4 (OpenAl 2023); 2) LLaMA-2 (13B-chat) (Touvron et al. 2023), an open-sourced language model optimized for dialogue use cases; and 3) Mistral (7B-instrun v0.1) (Jiang et al. 2023), an open-sourced LLM fine-tuned on instruction datasets publicly available on the Hugging Face repository.
To elicit reappraisals for emotional support, we experiment with 1) vanilla, weak baseline where the situation" to evoke a pristine reappraisal response from the language model. 2) self- refine MMddann et al. 2024), where the vanilla prompt is formulated repeated feedback,
Methods.
a generic prompt "help the narrator of the text reappraise

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baseline for refinement without guidance. 3) +appr, which explicitly requests the language model to identify the appraisals within the given context first before proceeding to interven- ing those appraisals and offering reappraisal ($3.3). 4) +cons, where we provide the language model with the elaborated constitutions in RESORT_S ($3.2). For each dimension, provide the corresponding constitution from RESORT in the prompt guidance for the model to generate the targeted reappraisal responses. 5) +appr +cons, which first performs explicit appraisals of the situation, then prompted with the constitutions.
Prompts and Setup. We provide the templates for prompting the LLMs in Appendix $B which includes the system prompt we used throughout the study, and the prompts as well as pseudo-code for eliciting reappraisal responses. We also added an instruction "Your response should be concise and brief" to the end of all prompts to require succinctness of the responses.
We conducted our experiments with GPT-4 turbo on the Azure Cloud platform. All our experiments for the open-sourced LLMs were carried out on Nvidia A100 GPUs. We used the HuggingFace Transformers (Wolf et al. 2020) library together with LangChain for model inference. For stability, we always sampled at temperature = 0.1.
5 Expert Evaluation of Targeted Reappraisals
As generating targeted reappraisals from LLMs is novel task, we propose an extensive evaluation schema ($5.1) that includes 4 criteria to assess the quality of the reappraisals generated by the LLMs. We sample LLM reappraisals well as human reference responses (totaling 225 instances) ($4.2) to conduct a first-of-its-kimg expert psychologist evaluation to also carry out automatic
assess LLMs' cognitive reappraisal ability (55.2). Additionally, evaluation using GPT-4 on all reappraisal responses collected (66), in an attempt to examine the capacity of current LLMs to perform systematic evaluation on such cognitive-loaded task as offering targeted reappraisal.
5.1 Evaluation Schema
1) Aligument with Reappraisal Constitutions: We evaluate whether the reappraisal re- sponse adheres to the constitutions outlined within RESORT and they serve reference yardsticks to assess the quality of reappraisal on each dimension. Evaluators are asked to provide a score on the Likert-scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being "Least Aligned" and 10 indicating "Most Aligned". This is also a direct evaluation of instruction-folloiing (Zhou et al., 2023a) in a complex, dopaif-specific setting.
2) Empathy: While reappraisal may align perfectly with the standards, it may not be perceived as empathic. Conversely, highly empathic response may also be doing the minimum amount of reappraisal (as we see in the case of simply comforting the narrator). Therefore, we further evaluate whether the reappraisal response demonstrates empathy towards the narrator of the Reddit post- whether it expresses, to the user, the sense of being cared for, understood, and valued. We ask evaluators to provide score on the Likert-scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being "Least Empathetic" and 5 being "Most Emputhetic".
3) Harmfulness: For safety concerns, we additionally ask evaluators whether the reappraisal response contains any unethical or harmful content. Options: "Harmful" (0) or "Not Harmful" (1).
4) Factuality: LLMs are prone to hallucinate ( al. 2023 Bang et al. 2023 Li et al., 2023). Therefore, we also include the aspect of factuality as part of our evaluation scheme, and ask evaluators whether the reappraisal response is factually consistent with the given Reddit post. Options: "Yes" (1), "Minor Error" (0.5), or "No" (0).
5.2 Expert Evaluation
Evaluators. We recruited 4 psychologists with expertise in clinical psychology as well as peer support from UpWork. All evaluators hold either Master's Ph.D. degree
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EXPERT PSYCHOLOGISTS
GPT4 VS EXPERTS
ALGN
EMPT
HARM
FACT
ALGN
EMPT
HARM
FACT
Krippendorff's
0.453
0.400
0.211
0.310
Spearman's p Randolph's Kappa
0.508
0.419
0.508 ** 0.444
0.824
0.538
0.874
0.458
Macro F1
0.952
0.711
0.966
0.670
p 0.05, < 0.01, < 0.001
Table 2: Inter-evaluator agreement among the expert psychologist evaluators ($ and the their agreement against GPT-4 ratings ($6).
in psychology. Before commencing the evaluation task, the evaluators were required to undergo a pre-annolation qualification as well as a training process using a set of reappraisals already annotated by our group. Throughout the annotation, consistently monitored the inter-evaluator agreement provided feedback on their work. They were paid at least $20 per hour.
Data and Instructions. Given a Reddit post and a targeted cognitive appraisal dimension, ask evaluators to evaluate the reappraisal response pertaining to the post with respect to the specific emotion appraisal dimension based on the evaluation criteria described above. For each criterion, we additionally provide text box to have the evaluators provide rationales for their ratings. The reappraisal responses are distributed to evaluators at ran- dom. As the reappraisals are intended to help the narrator of the Reddit post reframe their interpretation of the situation from distinct appraisal dimensions outlined in the RESORT. framework, we furnish the evaluators with a description of the intended objective or aim that the reappraisal response should accomplish. We showcase the layout of the expert evaluation task, as well as the instructions we provided to the evaluators in Appendix D.1
We sampled 184 reappraisal responses from the LLMs across 22 Reddit posts for psychology expert evaluation, ensuring that responses generated by different methods given the same query (Reddit post and appraisal dimension) are all sampled. We detail the sampling of LLM-generated reappraisal responses in Appendix $D.1 In addition, we also incorporated human perspectives by evaluating the oracle responses as well as top Reddit comments (4.2). These human reference responses are evaluated in the mix with model-generated responses.
Inter-Annotator Agreement. We assigned 2 evaluators per example for evaluation and report inter-annotator agreement values in Table 2 For Alignment and Empathy, report Krippendorff's Alpha with interval distance, as well as Spearman's 's correlation. For Harmful- ness and Factuality, due to extreme skew in the distribution towards not-harmful and factual (Appendix Figure 5), we report Randolph's kappa (Randolph] 2010), a free-marging version that is robust to such skew, as well as macro Fl by treating the labels as separate classes classification problem. The macro Fl values are calculated with respect to each evaluator and then averaged. For all categories, our expert evaluators had moderate substantial agreement (Artstein & Poesio, 2008).
exam
Results. Expert evaluation results for these targeted reappraisal responses are provided in Table 3 For the Alignment with Reappraisal Constitutions criterion, we observe significant improvement for each system from the baseline after providing L.MSs with the constitutions in RESORT_ Additionally, incorporating an explicit appraisal of the situation boosts the models' performance in providing targeted reappraisals. This suggests that using the explicit scrutiny of the situation an intermediate reasoning step improves the complex emotional reasoning, aligning with prior findings in common sense and symbolic reasoning (Wei et al. 2022). Frequent errors leading to low ratings for Alignment, includes a lack of actionable steps, vague suggestions, and failure to address reappraisal goals (Appendix Table 9).
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EXPERT PSYCHOLOGISTS EVALUATION
Alignment 10-POINT SCALE INDV
Empathy t
Harmfulness
Factuality
5-POINT SCALE INDV
YES/NO
YES/ MINOR/ /O
ITER
ITER
INDV
ITER
INDV
ITER
ORACLE RESPONSE
5.79
3.79
0.00
0.95
REDDIT COMMENT
2.75
2.00
0.39
0.62
vanilla
3.88
3.31
0.00
0.91
GPT4
sel
2.69
2.56
0.00
0.88
TURBO
+appr
4.69
5.06
3.25
4.06
0.00
0.997
+cons
* 7.81 ***
3.81
3.88
0.00
0.84
0.91
apppr +cons
7.12 TM 8.31 **
3.50
4.25
0.00
0.94
vanilla
6.25
3.88
0.00
0,91
LLAMA2 13B-CHAT
self relf-refine
4.31
2.88
0,00
0.84
+appr
5.31
5.62
3.31
3.88
0.12
0.00
0.81
0.88
+cons
7.81
7
3,75
4.12
0.00
0.06
0.97
1.00
aappr +cons
7.69
6.44
3.81*
3.25
0.00
0.00
0.97
0.84
vanilla
4.36
2.86
0.07
0.96
MISTRAL 7B-INSTRUCT
sel -elf-refine
4.14
2.64
0.07
0.89
+appr
5.50
5.64
2.93
2.57
0.00
0.07
0.89
0.79
*cons
6.50*
7.43
3.43"
3.71 **
0.00
0.00
0.89
0.93
appr +cons
6.71**
5.71
2.79
3.14
0.00
0.00
0.82
0.79
" 0.05, " 0.01, 0.001
Table 3: Expert evaluation results (in average scores) for reappraisal responses. We report statistical significance using pair-wise t-tests against the self-refing baseline. Responses with non-zero harmfulness are shaded.
Overall, prompting with the iterative guided refinement strategy tends to outperform the individual strategy in terms of providing reappraisal responses that align with our constitu- tions. This holds true for the perceived empathy level of the reappraisals as well. Explicit appraisals or constitution guidance largely help improve empathy levels across models. Nonetheless, when the response fails to validate the narrator's emotions, address specific issues, or simply too blunt and distant, the evaluators perceive with a low level of empathy (Appendix Table 10
Close scrutiny reveals that most LLM-generated reappraisals (around 98.1%) are perceived to contain no harmful content, especially with GI'T-4 turbo. On the other hand, psychologist evaluators rated the highest-upvoted Reddit comments to be harmful 38.6% of the time, suggesting lack of support for mental well-being these social media platforms from the eyes of professional clinical psychologists. Common types of responses found to be harmful those that are stress and anxiety-inducing and discounting or excluding professional help (Appendix Table Similarly, LLM-generated responses were consistently rated as more fuctual than the highest-upvoted Reddit comments. Explicit appraisal and constitution guidance improve the Factuality of GPTT4 and Llama-2 outputs but not Mistral. Common factual errors include assumptions not specified in the post, as well incorrect or misleading context (Appendix Table 12)..
In general, Llama-2 (13b-chat) and Mistral (7B-instruct) achieve comparable performance as GPT-4 turbo in providing reappraisal responses that help reframe the narrator's 's negative appraisals of the situation, underscoring the potential of open-sourced models on such psychologically oriented tasks, especially when privacy matters.
Interestingly, the evaluators scored LLM-generated reappraisals (guided by RESORT, higher than those authored by humans (i.e., oracle responses, Reddit top comments). This most evident in criteria including Alignment with Reappraisal Constitutions and Empathy, which indicates that LLM-generated reappraisal responses guided by RESORT consis- tently outperform the responses expected from the original platform of the post according to psychology experts, and are equal to more preferred than our human expert responses.

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6 A First Take on the Automatic Evaluation of Targeted Reappraisal Quality
In an attempt to examine current LLMs' capability to perform systematic and in-depth evaluation of cognitive-loaded tasks, we additionally employ GPT-4 to assess the quality of all reappraisals collected (including the 20 oracle responses in $4.2 197 Reddit comments curated in Appendix C We provide the results on the full set of responses in Appendix Table
Prompts and Setup. We use GPT-4 AOpenAl
2023 to perform the automatic evaluation
following the 4 criteria described in $5.1 Following (Liu et al. 2023 Lin & Chen 2023),
given evaluation criterion e, Reddit post P, and reappraisal responses r, we prompt the language model M with Peoui to assign a score under the evaluation schema: s
((eeall @ e @ steps, P + r) where steps, indicates the step-by-step instructions (adopted from the detailed instructions provided to expert evaluators; full prompts showcased in A Appendix Figure 9 and 10) for GPT-4 to assess based on criterion e. We carried out our automatic evaluation under a zero-shot setup. All experiments were performed on the Azure Cloud platform, and we set the temperature to 0.1 for stability.
Can GPT-4 Evaluate Targeted Reappraisals? Using the ratings for the subset of targeted reappraisal responses that expert psychologists have evaluated as ground truth labels, we assess the extent to which state-of-the-an language models such as GPT-4 can perform extensive cognitive evaluation tasks. By treating GPT-4 as an independent evaluator, we measure its inter-evaluator agreement and Spearman's correlation with either of the expert evaluators on each instance, and report the results in Table Overall, GPT-44 demonstrates moderate agreement and correlation with expert psychologist evaluators, especially in terms of criteria Aligument as well as Empathy.
Discussed in detail in Appendix S consistent with the expert psychologists evaluation, GPT-4 also rated the LLM-generated reappraisals guided by RESORT.8 as more "Aligned" with the constitutions than the oracle responses well às the highest-upvoted Reddit comments. Interestingly, we also observe 30% of the Reddit comment marked by GPT-4 as "Harmful". These results underscore the potential of utilizing modern LLMs as canonical evaluator on labor-intensive evaluation tasks, provided that we use it with caution.
Analysis. We discuss characteristics of the reappraisals in detail in Appendix $D.3) Overall, LLMs tend to generate longer responses both when asked to incorporate explicit appraisals as well as under the guidance RESORT. in particular when prompted using the iterative guided refinement strategy. This could be because people tend to prefer longer model responses (Singhal et al. 2024], which have been factored into their training. In addition, LLM-generated reappraisals obtain much lower perplexity than human reference responses when calculated using LLaMA-2 (7B), suggesting that the LLM responses generally contain more commonly-used, generic phrases. This could partially explain why LLM-generated responses received higher evaluation ratings over the oracle responses.
7 Conclusion and Future Work
We present RESORT.S . (REappraisals for emotional SuppORT), a psychologically-grondde framework that defines a constitution for series of dimensions, motivated by the cognitive appraisal theories of emotions. Using two different prompting strategies, our extensive expert psychologists' evaluation reveals that the quality of LLM responses improves sig- nificantly when guided by RESORT.B. Our work marks the first step towards inducing cognitive reappraisal capabilities from LLMs with psychologically-gronn -rooundd frameworks. While this work shows that LLMs, even at the 7B scale, can be guided to produce context- appropriate reappraisal responses for emotional support, we leave for future work to explore the subjectivity of individual preferences for emotional supportive responses, multi-turn effectiveness of the reappraisal responses, as well as the long-term impact on emotional well-being from using guided cognitive reappraisals.
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Ethics Statement
Safety Measures. To ensure that there is no harmful content in the posts, we manually went through each post and comment to filter out content that is potentially harmful. We excluded situations and language that could be offensive to readers, alongside instilling intent to inflict harm or discussing illegal activities. We also made sure that there was no personally identifiable information in the post about the person who wrote the post or any others.
Privacy. We performed masking on the named entities in the Reddit posts and responses.
Limits on Generalizability. Psychological research has shown that there are cultural differences in appraisals and emotions (Yeo & Ong 2023), and likely also what types of reappraisals are appropriate in different contexts. Our study was done in predominantly Western context (in English, with European/ American psychologists) and may not be representative of all people. Importantly, we started with non-clinical context where the potential harms are lessened, and more work has to verify that these LLM-generated reappraisals could apply in more sensitive or serious contexts. Future work has to carefully consider the cultural and other contexts in which such AI is applied.
Potential Harms. The work presented here focuses on guiding LLMs to change people's appraisals in a positive manner to help them feel better. There is still much more be done to establish the validity of this approach. And even though such research is done with the best intentions, current technology cannot guarantee that harmful messages are never produced. Thus, we believe that, to mitigate potential harm, future applications should include a human-in-the-loog (e.g., Sharma al. 2023a) to ensure that harmful LLM responses are filtered out.
Acknowledgments
We thank David Beaver for his valuable comments and feedback. We also thank Jan Trienes for his generous help in setting up the annotation framework with Label Studio. We thank Jemima Cabanlong, Gianluca Mariano Colella, Lilli Deutsch, and Helen Sams (ordered alphabetically by last name) for their commitment and effort in evaluating the targeted reappraisals. We are grateful Andrea Conde, Karim Villaescusa Feuchter, Akhila Gunturu, Kathryn Kazanas, Jada Li, and Melanie Quintero (ordered alphabetically by last name) for their dedication and hard work in data collection. This project has benefited from the Microsoft AI, Cognition, and the Economy (AICE) research program. This work was also partially supported by NSF grant IIS-2107524.
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A RESORT _ Constitutions
We provide the constitutions in the RESORT, framework in Table 4 Each constitution targets one of the six cognitive appraisal dimensions, namely Self-Reeponsiiiiityy", "Problem- Focused Coping", "Attentional Activity", "Emotion-Focused Coping", "SelffControllable"" and " "Consistency with Internal Values".
Dimension
Constitution
If the narrator is stressing over things they are not responsible for, tell them that it may not require as much responsibility as they think and not to worry about them too much (depending level of responsibility in the situation). However, if the person is doing something wrong/ wrong/inappar /iaapp/opppprttieeee and not feeling any responsibility or (low responsibility), you should kindly but objectively encourage them to reappraise the situation (or maybe think in the other person's 's perspective) and consider what they could be responsible for, and change the situation. Provide realistic and specifie guidelines.
how high they perceive their
SELF- RESPONSIBILITY
You should tell the narrator to focus the problem at hand, and encourage them to ask themselves whether the issue is in their control not. If any part of the issue manageable steps and develop detailed plan to tackle each aspect (like a to-do list). If the narrator feels overwhelmed to do this alone, don't 't hesitate to look for support from friends/fane family. Do not be overwhelmed by the scope of the issue; they could focus on the task they have narrowed down on the to-do list. Encourage them find joy in striking off items from this list, focusing on the accomplishments. Without even realizing it, they will find themselves feeling empowered, having taken control of the situation. After accomplishing them, if needed re-evaluate the situation and repeat the process!
their control, start breaking down the problem into
PROBLEM- FOCUSED COPING
You should tell the narrator to examine whether the situation at hand is worth their attention. If it's not, encourage the narrator to focus other important things. Encourage the narrator find something that's easier and less stressful to tackle.
ATTENTIONAL ACTIVITY
You can ask the narrator to recognize what upsetting them. Encourage the narrator to think of ways to reduce negative emotions, control their (negative) feelings, and avoid situations, individuals, objects, or memories that trigger such negative emotions upset them.
EMOTION- FOCUSED COPING
You can tell the narrator whether the situation is within their control (based on your (in third-person view) judgment). Guide the narrator how to control the situation specifically: they can face it directly and find solution, seek help from others (close friends, family, or professionals), or take a mental break and then re-evaluate the situation, whether it calls for their action (intervention) or not.
SELF- CONTROLLABLE
Tell the narrator that in situations where multiple people interact, conflicts of internal values may arise. What the narrator values is important; however, it may not always be suitable depending the situation. Communicating amicably with others vital if the situation aligns with the narrator's 's beliefs. On the other hand, if the situation contradicts the narrator's 's beliefs, it's essential to reappraise the situation and think from others' perspectives. For instance, if the narrator firmly believes that everyone should adopt vegan lifestyle, it's important to acknowledge the validity of that viewpoint. Yet, remind the narrator that conflicts interest and belief can arise certain contexts, and misunderstandings might emerge due a lack of context or background knowledge.
CONSISTENCY WITH INTER- NAL VALUES
Table 4: Constitutions for the 6 appraisal dimensions in our RESORT framework. Defini- tions of each dimension on the left column is explained in the main body of this section.
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Self-Responsibility assesses the extent to which the narrator of the Reddit post thinks they are responsible for causing the situation or consequences (Frijda et al., 1989 Reisenzein
& Hofmann, 1990; Smith & Lazarus [993] Lazarus 1991; Scharer et al. 2009; Smith & Ellsworth 1985 Knobloch| 2005 Miranda et (020). For reappraisal, if the situation falls
within the narrator's 's's responsibility, such conflict with friend, act of violence, being rude to others, or taking a vaccination, the constitution is written in a way that requires the narrator to take responsibility and determine how to handle the situation. If the narrator is feeling overly responsible for situations that may be beyond their control (such as natural disaster or something that hasn't happened yet), the constitution guides them to re-evaluate the situation and acknowledge that they are not entirely responsible for it.
Problem-Focused Coping examines the extent to which the narrator thinks they can cope with the consequences of the situation (Lazarus 1991: Kavussanu et al. 2014 Krispenz & Dickhäuser 2019: Yeo & Ong. 2023). One can re-appraise the situation tocusing their competence, or self-efficacy to tackle the issue. If the narrator believes they have the resources or knowledge to manage the situation, the constitution encourages them to break down the problem into manageable steps to prevent feeling overwhelmed. This could involve breaking down the problem into smaller tasks or creating a to-do list. If tackling this alone seems overwhelming, it's recommended to seek support. The purpose was to encourage the narrator to focus on feeling accomplished and joyful from making progress, finishing part or all of the procedure, and eventually solving the situation independently.
Attentional Activity evaluates the extent to which the narrator thinks they need to attend
to the situation further (Lazarus 1991; Scharer et al. 2009 Smith & Ellsworth) 1985). For reappraisal, the narrator is asked to reconsider the situation and determine if it's worth their attention. If not, they are encouraged to shift their focus to other matters. However, the purpose is not to always diverge the narrator's 's attention when they need to focus on the matter and when the situation is controlled by the narrator. For example, if the narrator is stressed out worrying too much about the negative side of the situation the things they have missed, they are encouraged to focus more on the bright side and what has been accomplished.
Einouenn-oouuedd Coping gauges how well the narrator thinks that they can emotionally cope with the consequences of the event [Lazarus 1991). Specifically, the narrators are asked to acknowledge the emotion they are currently feeling (e.g., stress) and asked to evaluate what can be done to alleviate that negative emotion. In addition, the narrator was advised to consider ways to regulate their emotions, confronting or avoiding any potential triggers (e.g., objects, individuals, events) that may exacerbate their stress (e.g., keeping themselves busy with other things).
Self-Controllable appraises how well the narrator can control what is happening in the situation. (Reisenzein & Hofmann Scharer Scharer et al. 2009 Smith & Ellsworth] 1985) In
particular, the narrators were asked to reassess the situation to determine if there is room for change if they intervene, or think differently. This could involve facing the situation directly and finding a solution, such as seeking help from others or professionals. If needed, they have the option to step back and reassess the situation. For example, while the narrator may not have control over a pandemic, they can control their perception of the situation, take care of their health, and manage their distress levels.
Consistency with Internal Values examines whether the situation is consistent with the narrators' values (Eccles) 1983; Pekrun 2006 Goetz et al., 2020 Yeo & Ong. 2023). This can be a value that one perceives as right or wrong or a desired behavior in a certain circumstance, such as following a vegan lifestyle or being a strict parent. The goal of reappraisal was also to encourage the narrator to consider other possible perspectives because lack of context or background knowledge may influence such perceived conflict of personal beliefs.
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B
Prompts Used for Inducing Cognitive Reappraisal from LLMs
System Prompt.
We use the following system prompt throughout our experiments:
System Prompt
Respond with response in the format requested by the user. Do not acknowledge my request with "sure" or in any other way besides going straight to the answer.
Prompting for Targeted Reappraisals. We provide the pseudo-code for eliciting reap- praisal responses using the individual guided reappraisal prompting strategy in Algorithm [ and iterative guided refinement in Algorithm Additionally, we showcase the full prompts in Figure 3
Algorithm 1 Pseudo-code for the individual guided reappraisal (INDV) prompting strategy, in [+appr +cons], to demonstrate both explicit appraisal and RESORT constitutions.
Require: user input language model M, dimension d, constitution Ca. appraisal prompt Pappraise, reappraisal prompt Preappraise
1: Initialize M
appraisala (P @ Pappraists)
// explicit appraisal step // RESORT.P guidance
3: ra MMP Pappraise, @ appraisal Preappraise Cạ)
4: return Reappraisal Output Ta
Algorithm 2 Pseudo-code for the iterative guided refinement (ITER) prompting strategy, in [tappr +cons], to demonstrate both explicit appraisal and RESORT constitutions.
Require: user input language model M, dimensions {d d (1,2.... constitutions {Ca E (1,2.... u.). appraisal prompts (Pappraise; d E (1,2...n)}.. refinement prompt Prefiner reappraisal prompt Preappraise
1: Initialize M
appraisalı MMP e Pappraise
1/ initial appraisal
3: "apprise [M Pappraise, ① appraisaly Preappraise)
// initial reappraisal based appraisal
4: Reset M
r1 (MP Nappenis Cj O Prefine)
// initial reappraisal refined with RESORT. guidance
6: for d E (2,3,...n) do
7: Reset M
8:
appraisea M(P D Pappraisez)
// explicit appraisal step
9:
Yduappain M(P @ ra-1 ( Pappraises appraise @ Prefine)
// refine previous step based on appraisal
10: Reset M
11:
F2
M(P Valapranee e Cd Prefine)
// refine appraisal -based step with RESORT guidance
12: end for
13: return Final Output Fu
C Source Data Details
Length of Reddit Posts. We showcase the distribution of the length of Reddit posts in our source data in Figure We curated Reddit posts between 50 and 400 tokens long, excluding punctuation. This allows us to have posts that are long enough, but still manageable for our task. The average length of posts is 159.4 tokens (SD = 81.1).
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Individual Guided Reappraisal (INDV):
Iterative Guided Reappraisal (ITER):
ld = (M + Preappraise + Ca)
ld = M + rd-1 ① Ca + Prefine)
Each prompt with:
First prompt is Individual Generation. Then, each subsequent prompt starts with:
[Text] (post)
[Text] (post)
[Reappraisal Response] (prev_stepp
Without Explicit Appraisals
Without Explicit Appraisals
vanilla
self-refine
[Question] Please help the narrator of the text reappraise the situation.
[Feedback] Please revise the reappraisal response help the narrator reappraise the situation better.
+cona
+ +cona
[Feedback] (constitution) Taking this into account, please revise the reappralsal response additionally
[Question] Please help the narrator of the reappraise situation. (constitution)
feedback, minimally modifying the original response.
Incorporate Explicit Identification of Appraisal Dimension
(e.g. [saltrasponsiillltty) (post) To what extent did the narrator think that THEY were responsible for causing the situation? Rate scale from with being "Narrator thought "Narvator thought they were: Completely responsible". text doesn't address question, please "NA". Additionally, tell us why.
Not responsible" and 9 being
Prompt:
Prompt(s):
+appr
+appr
[Feedback] (step appralsal) Based above appraisal, please revise the resppraisal response to additionally address this feedback, while minimally modifying the original response.
[Question] Based on the analysis above, pleese help the narrator of the text reappraise
+appr +oons
+appr +cons (after above step first)
[Question] Based on the analysis above, help the text reappralsee the situation. (constitution)
[Feedback] (constitution) Taking this into account, revise reappraisal
additionally address feedback, minimally modifying the original response.
Figure 3: Full prompts for eliciting reappraisals from LLMs.
Topic Variation in Reddit Posts. To better understand the data behind each domain, we use Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) (Blei et al. 2003) to extract the topics in the Reddit posts. The posts are lower-cased, and punctuation as well as common stopwords are removed. We showcase the unigrams corresponding to the most prominent topics in Table We observe a clear difference among the topics posts from different domains.
Curating Reddit Comments. For a quality check on these comments, we filtered for posts that have at least 1 comment, with the most up-voted comment having at least 2 up-votes. This way, we ensure the sampled comment is up-voted by at least one other user than the poster themselves, as Reddit awards the comment poster one up-vote by default. We collected a total of 197 such (post, top comment) pairs. For expert evaluation, 21 pairs were scrutinized.
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Count
30
20
10
100
150
200
250
300
350
400
Post Length
Figure 4: Distribution of the length of Reddit posts in our source data.
ANGER
ANXIETY
PARENTING
COVID19 SUPPORT
anger
like just
work
feel
want
utilitarian
know
completely
anxiety
grandparents
covid
somebody want angry really later time stuff sleep
neglected bed
things
vaccinated
membership
vaccine
issues
just
said
don
stormy
family
people
know
trained
fully
attitude
feel
bashes
getting
Table 5: Topic modeling results over the Reddit posts in our source data. The words are associated with the most prominent topic across the 4 domains in our Reddit posts, namely r/Anger, r/Anxiety, r/Parenting, and r/COvID19 ttpport.
D Targeted Cognitive Reappraisals Details
D.1 Expert Evaluation Details
Expert Evaluation Task. We carry out the expert evaluation task for targeted reappraisals on Label Studio. We showcase the human evaluation task layout for measuring the quality of reappraisals in Figure We provide detailed instructions for each criterion (showcased in Figure 7 to the evaluators, together with an elaborated Q&A document addressing potential misunderstandings (see Figure 8
Sampling LLM-generated Reappraisals for Expert Evaluation. We sample subset of responses from LLMs for human evaluation. Since the reappraisal responses are intended to target different cognitive appraisal dimensions individually, we ensure a fair distribution across different appraisal dimensions, language models, as well as domain data when conducting the human evaluation. At the same time, we also guarantee that all the reap- praisal responses generated from the same language model under different conditions are constantly sampled within the same appraisal dimension and Reddit post. Specifically, we sample the intersection of (post, dimension, model) tuples. The above desiderata results in total of 184 reappraisal responses across 22 Reddit posts.
Expert Evaluation Error Analysis. We instructed our expert psychologist evaluators to provide rationales for their ratings reappraisal responses. restonnses. We identify the frequent errors leading to low ratings for the 4 criteria Alignment, Empathy, Harnfulness, and Factuality in Tables 10 11 and 12 respectively.
could find potential areas of improvement for our
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Aligmment
Empathy
8
7
Relings
6
5
4
3
2
Harmlunnes
Factuality
Ratings
0.5
GPT4
Uama2
Mistral
Oracle
Comment
GPT4
Llama22
Mistral
Oracle
Comment
Figure Distribution of the ratings from the human evaluation by the expert psychologists for targeted reappraisal responses.
MODEL
STRATEGY
METHOD
CONTENT
Did your anxiety get worse from therapy? I've been therapy almost two years. Regular twice per week visits. I (thought that would help me figure out why struggle.
Post
To sum I've had more of chaotic childhood than I've ever realized. The more I'd realize this during.
therapy, the
would get.
anyone Maybe doing therapy thing wrong???
Resppraisal: guide
perception
Therapy experiences vary greatly person person and depend
you Did
you elearly communicate what you want your objectives for arssion? therápist trying sorts different approaches that don't match what you have asked for? It could due to many factors, and there several steps that you both should work throughout the sessions. Some people different therapists find who refocus your attention what you truly need from therapy. 5o, say keep trying but since it's been two years and you don't see any hope with your current thempist maybe it's time to soarch for a new one.
Oracle Response
suits
needs expertise. It's Important
therapy is triggering your childhood trauma memories, give more time to resolve therapy helped the most to deal with my traumatic memories. took almost 4 years but helped tremendously.
Top Reddit Comment
Heightened ansiety during therapy often indicates progreso as you deliee into past issues. It's sign of moving forward, not mistake. Discuss these leelings with your therapist to adjusi your treatment plan ensure you't supported throughout process.
GPT4 turbo
ITER
self refine
of traumas unresolved issues, which process, though challenging to discuss these feelings with your therapist to ensure you have the support and coping strategies needed to manage this increased anxiety. Therapy journey of uncovering and addressing issues that may not have been fully acknowledgee before, and it's about progress, perfection.
for therapy initially increase lead heightened ansiety.
GPT4 turbo
part bealing. important
ITER
*appr
It's natural for therapy bring heightened awareress part
Remember, you're blame which can lend incrusse ansiety: chactic childhood, you whether andiety-inducln lopics deserve your energy al
healing control your healing If not, redirect your focus to more managubble areas. Discuse these feelings with your therapist to pussibly adjust your therapy approach. Identify aspects your anxiety you can control, break them down into actienable steps,
GPT4
turbo
ITER
+oons
needed celebrate step you ovencome, empowering yourself through progress Keep communicating with your therapist and revisiting your strategy as you move forward.
support
In therapy, heightened amxiety can be part of the healing journey as you confront past traumas It's not indicative of doing therapy wrang, Assess whether the issues causing anoeety warrant your energy or it's healthier to shift focus
GPT4
ITER
Wark with therapist aspects you centrol, praclice letting go what you Openly discuse these feelings with your therapast to refine your coping stralegies. Remember; therapy has its ups and downs, and it's okay seek extra support from loved ones.
menageable
small, achievable goals
Table 6: An example of cognitive reappraisal responses to the same post.
D.2 Targeted Reappraisal Example
We showcase example of the cognitive reappraisals in Table
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D.3 Additional Analyses of the Targeted Reappraisal Responses
Tokens INDV
BLEU-3 INDV
ROUGE-L INDV
BERTScore INDV
Perplexity
ITER
ITER
ITER
ITER
INDV
ITER
ORACLE RESPONSE REDDIT COMMENT
154.6
0.026
0.131
0.829
5.91
92.3
0.020
0.110
0.826
9.09
Vanilla
81.4
0.018
0.119
0.832
4.27
CPT4
self-refine
55.1
0.008
0.097
0.835
6.20
TURBO
+appr
89.5
123.1
0.018
0.022
0.117
0,122
0.833
0.822
4.48
4.47
+cons
121.4
149.9
0.016
0.020
0.107
0.114
0.826
0.827
4.33
4.16
appp econs
119.7
151.5
0.015
0.019
0.109
0.113
0.826
0.827
4.20
4.28
Vanilla
165.9
0.049
0.148
0.838
3.01
LLAMA2 13B-CHAT
sel self-refine
98.0
0.028
0.129
0.834
4.50
+appr
179.6
300.2
0.045
0.052
0.146
0.139
0.831
0.827
3.09
3.05
ccons
244.3
322.3
0.037
0.034
0.129
0.122
0.826
0.822
2.67
2.73
apppr +cons
239.9
335.3
0.031
0.031
0.123
0.116
0.821
0.817
2.97
2.85
vanilla
88.7
0.032
0.141
0.840
3.15
MISTRAL
self-refine
73.7
0.026
0.134
0.841
3.49
7B-INSTRUCT
+appr
117.9
221.3
0.028
0.052
0.126
0.137
0.828
0.825
3.55
3.22
+cons
130.9
256.0
0.031
0.030
0.130
0.121
0.830
0.822
3.15
3.25
+appr +cons
169.6
227.6
0.033
0.033
0.123
0.120
0.822
0.822
4.06
3.91
Table Additional analyses all targeted cognitive reappraisals collected.
Response Length. We measure the length of reappraisal responses in Table 7 Overall, LLMs tend to generate longer responses both when asked to incorporate explicit appraisals as well under the guidance of RESORT_ in particular when prompted using the iterative guided refinement strategy. Despite the instruction for "conciseness and briefness" described in $4.3 open-sourced LLMs such as LLaMA-2 (13B-chat) and Mistral (7B-instruct) produce rea reappraisals that are much longer compared to human reference responses. This could be because people tend to prefer longer model responses (Singhal et al. 2024), which have been factored into their training.
BLEU, ROUGE & BERTScore. We employ BLEU-3 (Papinení et al., 2002), ROUGE-L Lin (2004), and BERTScore (Zhang" al. 2020) metrics to capture the linguistic variety the responses compared to the given Reddit post. Upon closer inspection of Table 7 we observe generally low measures of BLEU-3 and ROUGE-L scores and high measures of BERTScore. This indicates that while responses do not contain many exact word or n-gram matches, they retain semantic and contextual alignment with the provided user inputs (i.e., Reddit posts). For any of these automated metrics, do not observe appreciable difference across human and LLM-generated responses.
Perplexity. To represent the linguistic complexity responses, we calculate the perplexity score of the reappraisals with LLaMA-2 (7B) using minicons (Misra 2022):
1
N
exp2 (- x
Σ log2 logoP(wx ,.,,,,,,,,,,,,..
w;-1)).
In Table 7 we observe that LLM-generated reappraisals obtain much lower perplexity than human reference responses, suggesting that the LLM responses generally contain more commonly-used, generic phrases. This could partially explain why L.M--generated responses received higher evaluation ratings over the oracle responses provided by the expert psychologist.
E
GPT-4 Evaluation Templates
We provide the template for evaluating reappraisals using GPT-4 in Figure 9 and Figure 10
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GPT-4 AUTOMATIC EVALUATION
Alignment 10-POINT SCALE INDV
Empathy 1
Harmfulness
Factuality
5-POINT SCALE
YES/NO INDV
YES/ MINOR/ /O
ITER
INDV
ITER
ITER
INDV
ITER
ORACLE RESPONSE
7,50
3.70
0.00
0,80
REDDIT COMMENT
4.98
2.85
0.30
0.50
vanilla
7.52
3.94
0.00
0.97
GPT4
self-refine
7.15
3.76
0.00
0.95
TURBO
+appr
7.71 MP
7,82
3,93
3.96
0.00
** 0.73
0.98
+cons
7.92
8.36 Tx
3.45
3.98
0.00
0.00
0.95
aappr +cons
7.91 **
8.32 +
3.50
3,99
0.00
0.96 ***
0.74
vanilla
7.49
3.96
0.00
0.89
LLAMA2 13B-CHAT
self fine
6.81
3.79
0.00
0.78
+appr
*M
7.14
3.80
3.34
0.00
0.00
0.68
0.74
+cons
8.41
8.24
3.86***
3.94
0.00
0.00
0.82
0.80
aappr +cons
7.75
7.96
3.56
3.71
0.00
0.00
0.59
0.65
vanilla
6.79
3.85
0.90
MISTRAL
sel self-refine
6.70
3.84
0.00
0.88
7B-INSTRUCT
*appr
6.27
6.52
3.34
3.47
0.00
0.00
0.70
0.70
*cons
7.55
7.60
3.57
3.63
0.00
0.00
0.68
0.71
appr
+cons
6.57
6.90
2.87
3.07
0.00
0.00
0.50
0,50
"P < 0.05, " 0.01, 0.001
Table 8: Mean GPT-4 evaluation results for all reappraisal responses. We conduct statistical significance using pair-wise t-tests against the sel feeffinn baseline. Responses that are perceived as harmful are shaded.
F GPT-4 Evaluation Results
We employ GPT-4 to assess the quality of all reappraisals collected (including the 20 oracle responses in $42 and 197 Reddit comments curated in Appendix SC and provide the results the full set of responses in Table 8
Compared to our expert psychologists evaluation, the oracle responses received higher ratings Alignment under GPT-4 evaluation responses, albeit the LLM-generated responses still obtained higher ratings overall. In addition, compared to baselines, GPT-4 rate responses more likely to contain lower ratings in Empathy and Factuality, except in GPT-4 turbo. We observe little-to-none indication of harmfulness any outputs except in human-authon Reddit Comments.
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Reddit Post
post /rasspegeers)
My almost year old son, who has Aspergers, stariing a new day camp next week, We've spoken to the councilors an given them as much background as we can. The question
up front with (hipp //wwww amazon cal ap/produutt/ B4B1 wttp://raaooo_rroltaaoo ). This could be dona the contect each kid tolling something unique aboun them self. My son is very open Aspergers, and would have no problem doing that.
whether
first reading book Aspergers (Imaybe onel
People the 'against
concems
dingllng
may cause more problems teasing.
People on the 'for side point out that the kids will pick fairly quiclly that is different and being up-front about what that difference is and how they could help could prevent problemn Also, they point that had physical disability you would certainty talk about e "Bily has so dock and you play ball with
go
So what do you think?
Alm of the Reappraisal
guid narrator their perception responsiiiity causing
Reappraisal Response
It seems you're carefully considering how support son's transition into new envronment, which is commendable Since the text doesnt indicate that feel responsibbe for causing any particular situation, there's no need to reassess your level of responsibility Howeves it's important to balance being informative with the counselors integrate discussion broader conversation in about diversity and inclusion, emphassiring ig that everyone has qualitioe. This approach could faster understanding without placing undue attertion on your son. Enosuragee the camp to create an ewironment where all differences are respected and celebrated, which could help all children, not just your son, comfortable and accepted
children ensuring your son singled
might
working
Aspergers naturally
1. On ocale to 10, what extent does the reappraisal responce align with the following standards?
Standadd
narrator is atressing over things are responsible good reasoraisal response
them may not require as responsibiiity thyy them much (olpending how high they perceive their level of responsisiity the sitation).
think and not
* However if the person dbing something wreng//isppropnete and not feeling any responsibility for (low responstbillty, good reappraical response should kinely but objectively encnorage them ee-oppraise situation (or maybe think the other personk perspective) and consider what they could responsible for, and the situation.
-A good rapprrisaal responss should also provida reatiatic and specific guidelinss.
(Leest Aligned with the Standarde)
10 (Must Aligned with the Standards)
Can you explain please?
The resppra isall response contains precise information regarding the Reddit post. It also brings the advice seamlessly and acknowledges how no sense of mesponsiilityg.uit fwit, addressed the standards regarflees and met The entiee reappeaisal response revolves the post, and comprised of specific detaiis from post, bringing enough
conmects
2) to empathettc do you reappralaal respones?
(Least Empathetic)
(Most Empathetic)
Can you explain why, please? (Optional)
The resporse reads very empatheric. é
3) Does the reappraisal response suggest anything unethical harmful?
Can you explain why, please? (Optional)
content sugpested.
4) reappraisal response factuallyy consistant with post?
No
Minor Error
Yes
Can you explain please? (Optional)
The content from the posi mentioned in the response is factually consistent with what was describeding in the post
Figure 6: Layout of the human evaluation task for assessing the quality of reappraisals.
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Published as a conference paper at COLM 2024
Evaluating Cognitive Targeted Re-Appraisal Responses
[Instructions]
This is an annotation task to assess the quality of cognitive targeted reappraisal responses. The goal of the reappraisal responses is to guide users in altering their perception of particular cognitive aspects in how they interpret given situation. During the evaluation process, you will begin reading Reddit post. Subsequently, you will read the Alm of the Reappraisal highlighted yellow, indicating the specific cognitive interpretation aspect targeted the reappraisal intervention. Following this, you find Reappraisal Response, marked green, which is the part we ask you to evaluate.
The evaluation will be conducted based on 4 criteria, namely: 1) "alignment with reappraisalstanddrds",, "empathy"; 3) "ethicality"; and 4) "factuality". The detailed instructions for each question are shown below.
scale of 10, what extent do you think the reappraisal response aligns with the following standards? (Please that the standards vary depending the specific cognitive aspect being targeted.)
Whether the reappraisal response adheres the standards established for reappraisal responses directed at particular cognitive aspect. In simpler terms, this criterion focuses on evaluating how well the reappraisal response conforms to the set standards, rather than assessing the overall impression derived from the response.
2
8
10
(Least Aligned with the Standards)
[Most Aligned with the Standards)
2) On scale of 5, how empathetic you find the reappraisal response?
* Whether the reappraisal response demonstrates empathy towards the user (narrator of the Reddit post). In other words, this criterion evaluates the extent to which the reappraisal response demonstrates, to the user, the sense of being cared for, understood, and valued.
(Least Em patheetic)
(Most Empathetic)
3) Does the reappraisal anything unethical or harmful?
* Does the reapproisal response include any unethical or harmful suggestions, whether directed towards the other individuals, society whole?
"Not Harmful": the reappraisal response does "not" contain unethical harmful content
"Harmful": reappraisal response "contains" unethical or harmful content
4) Is the rationale factually consistent with the post?
* Whether the reappraisal response faithfully reflects what's stated in the post. In other words, does the reappraisal response accurately describe what the post saying, does misrepresent hallucinate the content some way?
"Yes" the reappraisal response responn accurate
"Minor Error": the reappraisal response contains some minor errors or omissions
"No": if the reoppraisal response contains significant errors, misrepresentations, significant hallucinations to the question
Figure 7: Detailed instructions that we provided to the evaluators for assessing the quality of reappraisals.
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[Q & A]
Would you want me to jot down "Sure, I'd be happy to help the narrator reappraise the situation." and other direct responses to being asked the prompt as not relevant to the post? Or just ignore it in my evaluation?
You can just ignore it in the evaluation
There several instances where the reappraisal pointed something out what could be considered insensitive way. was factually correct, something want to consider as "Dissatisfying" when rating the response? Or should stick to the guidelines listed (the nature of the advice being well aligned with the post/specific)?
wording could cause negative reaction from user, is this
Great catch! The perceived level of "empathy" or responsiveness from the reappraisal response should be separated from all other evaluation criteria. We have added new criterion to assess the empathy level the reappraisal response demonstrates towards the narrator of the post. Specifically, the "empathy" criterion should separated from "how well the response adheres the specific reappraisal standards". Sometimes it's hard tell these apart at glance because these responses are put nicely and "coated" with empathic phrases. But if you take off those and really focus on whether it addresses the targeted reappraisal or not becomes simple to determine whether it's addressed in the reappraisal response (e-g,, yes with minimal amount, not at all..etc..
Should distinguish between reappraisals that connected specific details from the post to their advice between those that just use overarching terms such as "circumstances" or "difficult situation" or that enough considered specific guideline given that the advice attached itself specific to what the user is facing? had issues attempting this when got to reappraisals that I felt were much better the sense that it felt like was actually talking to someone (instead of being given advice that fit my situation but was more general). This one was hard to explain.
Yet another great point! During the evaluation process, it crucial distinguish between reappraisal respanses that provide specific suggestions which align with
narrator describing and those that offer more generic advice (e.g., suggesting that "you should talk to professional mental caretaker") in templated and broad manner. In fact, the reappraisal responses where you felt that the narrator was being listened to and the advice is really tailored to the subject matter that the narrator is facing are the desired responses we are looking for.
Criterion No ("alignment with reappraisal standards"), would you prefer strictly grade based the standards? Or should how well the standards are aligned within context of the post also matter? For example, the reappraisal response deliberates over the user's control over the situation to some extent, but misses a detail or important aspects of the post, should I penalize the response? Another extreme example would be meeting the standards at high level because the reappraisal response repeated a lot of the standards given to it in the prompt, but then ignored the actual content of the text.
Similar the question above, what are looking for is reappraisal responses that fit the standards within the context the post. This very important aspect should aim scoring, because otherwise simply meeting the standards wouldn't be useful didn't context (in our case, the Reddit post) given.
Figure 8: An elaborated Q&A document addressing potential misunderstandings that we provided to the evaluators for assessing the quality of reappraisals.
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REAMFRAIAA
Specilic Guidelinos/ Actionable Steps
fiee like con is pue hesh my head agstner the wall and peay something changes
metsphoncally... pouiing my leart
figuring Blings out but mtatex hos aucch I debunk lods like thene's s ahways more dhst that could came out. Seel like the only 'righi trong to would makkin things wouse familly know she
It's undesttnnbble that fed responsible fox thesitutiion but semenixx that you not sompllly in cnsted of your mother's belicl and acturne You have tadd your best debink the atuution and figine things cut, but sceettmme, deepite our beet etiorn, ttrngs don't go plarned. okay ocknowblolge that you are not resprsbbbee for your un beliels adliess the
ignoee it porsend okay
beonse any
but focking helplon, 3 full approval corran usson esught convinoe her but don't kesow hove long that will be. feel depressed and miserattie Covid ltseff was heoorable heinn
might helpfil facus control, auch taking of youraall and seoking frem othirs, rather than taking on too mach noparaibdity for the sctuatonn as whore Bemneber that it's okay feel ovenuhelreed and ponerdess the face yoursell alrudy support significant amount of uame and offert into addressing the theattuatins, and that it's okoy to take a step back and prtoerise your own well-heing
un what
situstions,
importent
this shit
Jiid'tt
nocded.
yours in cnmt and miseed all of this Fdl pribunly te happter overlll ddnntt knowe what louid say or vehtar do gie her undentaand feel like I'm breaking dones.
could ve
Today pooiiatrickas me
ans any twasa
exrtee
wheee she year One
prosiiily lazy and she clecs this weted thing where she lils her hoail down. fookl up, and shukes lix haxd have no idea what expact, but I'm a acaeed foe my smcuet grr.
crawinng (rhe mille
Early intervention prodcive to daughter's growth and can leed to postiive outtomes by sddrrssing her needs on
General/ Vegue Sugaestions Resporses
Im vaccinated cillegee stucent the U.S. who relocated to and part country May
intemnltpp. home in A higist ace firends again, but now Im worried this Dilte vanant will rewult thange going book to being just badi they were 2003) Do yiu think ressomable to expect things
the patential remember that the sitation encrely
things iniglt
sitacion bui within your oxitoll may be helpp ful to sock support from close friends, family. or prodostonale to help you navagate the etastan and find e sohitunn laking mental break se-rrdiuring atturnee may alo be bereficcl detemmning intervention mecessory
up gerting again because
Bsel like and somathing changes Mostll mutaphonee hapehelllly... littl hit liverally I've iried pousing my heart and sour into figuring thrnng out hut mathe how much dehonk seels like
badk
tiaac's always more
could
out
brovsee anothing vlee would making things wore the seet of my hamily I lenos that the canes shout the but feel fucking helpics. Thope Gull approoe coree soun so that mnight consinoe her Joan'
"right
prcicnal
Normtoo It sounds The you're experienciny distress 19 struggin Bamember the you're to not alons in thi, and thare are roaources oveilabae to support you. Priceitice self enre and ungage actiitkos that bring you joy It's okiy to ocenchelreed, and resching our support dign streggh waya
nother's COVID-
be. Corrdd lung beurable
weking support help you cope with
enurggh but
lie and decerved with this shit makes me with didn't hove to live through this Ir] could've we spent two years in corna and missed all of mis I'd gribablyy happier overall her understand. fiel
whut breaking
say
down..
Not Addressing Reuppraisal Goal
Rougprisal gual guide
their pancpption
atsand
sounds like the nomater is feeling stick a ditfccltt sharrion where their seper has cvnedd leevss their rebrioondipe with family and friends, and their ehtrrpts avaid ergaments by disiancing theesdrv have led fodingg the consequeene of event to rome extent lesming lovp their thserselove and aerd e empiging in discussonss that might trigge their anger. Oue potastiul resppnasal of Bee sitction sould be that the oucrsterss is ongerr uot root onse of sens, famil
Tos your anger coneed touse in your reltiionhiie with dl frienda?
you everseme whot your like think mpriwed how approach melationneips (Joe learned to keep things to myuelf by being muce quis and nox enpaging in galleringa/ / discassione as audhi
bandlan the
cops
that this has
moee
symptom Josper undaryying trying
kaop with fumily of foor that
make sprnn develop a docser batred for them which don't wark
IIl
decteun becnuse they coming from place of and being peniineeeeeedd by the nammorr citicimm
but thm
feet like theres winning becouse If was to social and spent more time wath them, it couates more uppartunity for has bown
Additionall, the nam stor's avoldince of arguments may be seen as sign strength and eane, naber than sagn wasimos fatiane narrator's schiece heyend relatieneupp postire goal
my
boy only curface leyel
many
myjuef and decelop smali-tslk type relatturshpp. Iov bovn in better place emo- cxnaly wath this appoadh but i hate the fac, that I may
By reftaming g the sitcatio in the way. the narmoer may be able to approach tisir adationniiis with: more open and comp soisesse mindct, tullar than uarratr's diilyy cope melatoenhipp suspeete they have the oepactly to addmee the tonne in thetr relattondiip and balancl managing their
become distant.
fecting is sluck cyds ol anger and pvudiasss
angumeents tights
coreequence
atten to control evveyddection and criticine disiees that affect then in atll.
and maistaining this rel reltioookiip..
(Conmenti) The resporic does not lungs the persuptins of whatherr the altution woeth narratur's attention and thus does not include suggosiaca line
Iasa vatcinated college student US who relocated to and part country May
pepppri godl guide nomorr over thiir peoeption their abiliy tocontall
thinge might better enorgia anternitap.
hepponing
Intuum
Nic Dhange
get vorne becaue of vantett They might get wome beceuse
homeee in aguud see friends again, but now Im worrled this Dettz vartant will resit things going lock being just baci they were oxpect thingo up geiing again bocause
too many people will continue to wood getting vaccinited or taking preovation, but the sinus inn't to blame anymone they are As long sn you'le vocerrated. you pari the solution the grskiam. and has rugpection
De you think mascmaall to
lovel of control
the attustion.
Reoppraital gooht guide the nomator their peoopption their shility cope with comsqquences the event
lined imposed their mask mundane despite being one the vaccitated countries
The ninp kenertatioss of mesk mandates evan highly vocsisated countios like lezwel can be seen prosettve meeemme grevent any oeharie the prymes
never be don'' seplas beasuee it ''cuus anstyy. okey" and don't semovee the I'm noe. I'm simply wortied that we'll never get bock to normal.
againet the well being the comaunily
for cantinued
mositocing and respornc now variants. This apprach can help croure that sutuen normaley is sustenable and weuu when it happene.
(Cumment) The meperaa semms mor bkee ixplenation the sttutton cafter the noratte asses their
approsc at respproical suggestions line
Table 9: Example of common model errors on Alignment with Reappraisal Constitutions identified by the expert evaluators.
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Published as a conference paper at COLM 2024
POST
REAPPRAISAL
Not Validating the Narrator's Emotions
Based on your deseription, it seems you are feeling overwhelmed by the ongoing pandemic and are taking on level of responsibility that may not be entirely necessary. To help you resppraise the situation, here are some guidelines
I. Focus un what you can control: Instead of warrying about things outside of your control, focus on what you can control, such as tiking care of yourself, following COVID rules, and being supportive member your community. manageable steps: If you by the situation, break down the problem into smaller, managesble steps. For example, if you' tr concerned about the delta variant, you could focus on getting vaccinated, practicing good hygieme, and staying informed about the virus.
So this will fourth time posting this type of post but I feel confused right now. Things Colorado have pretty much opened up again and to be hanest, Im back to living my normal life again and it has been glorious and has done w wonders to my mental health. followed the covid rules pretty hard before got my vaccines (maderna both shots and ever since the CDC individuals Im basically back to my pre pandemic life. This delia facking
2. Break down problent
werrwhllmed
in March and April) updated guidance to vaceinated
3. Find joy in accemplishmmntts As you work through each step, find joy in the accomplishments you make, This can help you feel empowered and in control of the situation.
variant has concerned and confused. Do the work against lockdown in the fall /winter? Will this ever end? hale everything
Seek support If you feel overwhelmed, don't afraid to seek support friends, family a therapist. Talking through your concerss with someone who can provide a different perspective can be helpful.
noe? you think we be back full
about the covid lockioow lifestyle but Im rule follower so Im
5. Reframe your thinking Remember that are completely responsible the pandemic. Instead thinking "I have to everything to stop the pandemic." try refreming your thinking to 'I am doing my part to help stop the pandemic." This can help you feel more in control and less overwbelmed focusing what you control, breaking down the problem into ageable steps, finding joy accump iishmennss, seeking support, and aming your thinking, you can take control of the situntion and feel more empowered. Remember, it's okay to feel overwhelmed, but by taking these steps, you can work through your feelings and find sense control and accomplistumntt
gonna comply if need be but this ongoing eycle breaking my
will to
Response is Too Blunt/ / Distant
I am visating family this week. All of my family members who are eligible for the vaccine, incloding myself. have gotten vaccinated. arent are my niec
The only peuple they are only 4 and I years old. wanted to see an old friend from high school, but found out that this friend did not vaccinated. My brother and sister law asking that avaid secing people who are not vaccinated since
nephew, because
Consider the health and safety of your young niece and nephew as a priority. Meeting your friend outdeors and socially distanced is lower-risk option, but important respect your family's wishes and the health guidelines they comfortable with. You can always recernect with your friend virtually or plan to meet in the future when it's safer for everyone.
children canmot vaccinated.
is too much to completely aveid seeing this person at the wishes of my brother, or would it be safe enough to see this pesson in outdoce setting socially distanced? know this stupid question, but curious what you would do.
Nut Addressing Specific Issues
Based on current guidelines, is generally safe for you visit your family now that you have been fully vactinated months. However, it always best to follow the recommendatiooss of local health authorities and take any necessary precoutions to ensure your safety and the safety of those around you.
have been fully vaccinated for 2 months now and wanna go visit my family who got their second doee last saturday. Will be okay it go now should i wait for the 2 weeks they fully vaccinated. Will sigrificantly less safe if go now?
[Comment]: Does not address concern regarding the family who have not been vaccinated for long.
Begin by identifying what aspects finding a new parents' group are within your control, You cin research, resch out, and create opportunities for connec- fion. Hene's a plan tackle the task:
List potential sources parent groups, such local community churches, libraries, or hospitals.
centers,
A friend of ours that lives dosse by stumbled group by luck when she pregnant. Too bad they exclusive to that particular neighhothood.
My wile is pregnant with our first child, and she is due in March.
local mother's 's
2. Visit these places or their wehsites to gather information about any groups
upcuming eventss
3. Reach
pediatricians offices
for recommendations.
My wife is staying home from work for 12 weeks after the baby is born, and we'd '' like to get into some new parent's group of don't know loo many couples the area with
4. Use social media to search local parenting groups or forums.
5. Consider starting your own group if existing omees don't meet your needs.
6. Ask friends, family, colleagues suggestions or introductions to their networks.
children.
I'm having a hard time wading through the shenanigans on the internet, Meetup .com scems like an OK source, but pages aren't kept up well. there any other site I should look for?
7. Attend local events or places where parents and children comgregate to meet other new parents organically.
you complete each step, take moment appreciate your progress. If those
you overwheelmed, seek support
you. Remember, small step is an achievement leading you clower to your goal. After completing these steps, assess the results and adjust your plan if necessary.
[Comment): The frustratiors using the internet to find resources not addressed.
Table 10: Example of common model errors on Empathy identified by the expert evaluators.
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POST
REAPPRAISAL
Stress/ / Anxiety Inducing
My mental bealth was never great before the pandemic but felt more grounded. Even though pandemie-wise things are objectively much better than they were, I'm still feeling the after-effects of year of iolation and high stress work. can
Focus on the aspects of your situation that you can control. Begin by breaking down your manageable steps. Create detailed plan with specific actions you can take, such as scheduling rigular themayy sessions within your budget, reaching, out lo acqualntances to rebuild friendships, or finding community groups that share your interests.
into smalles, more
nuticcable notch down my mood just compared to last summer. feel dead inside and doing snything requires a huge amount energy. I feel sad all the time, I aay more. I feel snd when see people having fun with friends and family: I don'thave that. My family isn't great and I have contact with them. had close friends but therapist see infrequenlly since I can't it afford more, but I'm starting to feel like he can't help me. I've known him for quite some time that's a sad thought, but feel like everything
my distant
during pardemiic have
process feels ovenwhelming. seek support from those azound you or consider online communilies for additional help, Concentrate and take satislaction each sccomplishment This apprach can help you regalin a sense of control eupowerment over your lire. As you make progress, reassess your situation and adjust your plan necessary [Comment]: Could be distressing to read the narrator.
says is repestt something he's said before rather than tailored advice my actual situation the present. We all repeat ourselves some extent. I probably need a fresh perspective I don't 't know. He's told me can call him If get in very bad way, so at least I have his support on that level. don't expect any advice solution
completing one task at time
this, At the end our struggles, can't expect any body else but to get myself out of it. But like sharing somebody.
day we'ne alone
Sune, I can help the narzator reappraise the situation. Bosed on the analysic, it seems that the narrator is taking on med- erate amount responsibllity for their current stress and anxiety. However, it's imporiant recognize their physical symstooms, such as the gastrointeatinal issues, may be beyond their control.
I'm currently completing my A levels (a series of exam you do the LKK at the age of 17 that determine whether get into university)... you imagine, been stressed. I'm under tromendous amount pressss pressure get very high to go, of which I'll
some
grades (straight A's). I've completed 2 exams, and have be sitting tomerrow, the next day, and the day after that...
I'm shocked at how this stress has effected me physically. I've allways been fairly
Here's is reapprissal of the situation that the narnator might find helpful!
neurolic, but ansiety lend to feel is bransient, and ranely severe enaugh
to manifest anything physically significant, beyond a raised pube and slight breathleseness.
"I'm experiencing lot of stress and amxiety right now, and it's understandable that I'm feeling overwhelmed. While I may have contributed my current situation by getting myself 'way too worked up/" some of my physical symptoms are heyond my control. It's important to recognize that I'm doing the best can in challenging situation, and that it's okay to take breaks and prioritize well-being when neededd.
knnw I gettting myself "way" worked up when I started to pull out hair corving out. I've
very thick brain fog. which hase't been least hit helphul during time hen have he the most alert and and "with it. I've had no appetite, and now my trousers are all loose, with pair literally falling down when walk. The most bizarre symptum I've had this terse and stiff, As hypochondriac) I was convinced this was a heart attack, but I was reassured that it's probably just ansiety. I've had weird gastrointestinal symptoms, where feel nauseous, and have this in my stomach all of the time. which could be caused by lack of eating, but persists even when And then of course feelings of impending doom, etc etc. just can't wast for this to be over.
the shower.
jaw tension- my jaw very clicky, and feels
This reopyraiial acknow the narmator's resporsilillity for their stress and anxiety, while also recugnizing that some of their physical symptoms may be beyond their control. By balanced view of the situation, the narratoe reduce their stress and anxiety levels, feel more in control their well well-heing.
taking may be
eateen.
[Comment]: The lack of comforting words and validation could be distressing for the narrotor
Discounting/ / Excluding Professional Help
Gaming rage (m, 21, has ADHD/ / tourettes and aspergers) I get angry /blow up, sometimes throw things (nut expensive things like controllers I play games
thing) bang de worse after better runs,
It's normal to feel angry frustrated when playing gammes, important remember that these emotions porary and not a reflection of your worth as a person, It may be helpful to practice mindruiness and self-oopassion when experiencing these emations. Additionally, finding other hubbies activities cutside gaming can bring juy and fuliillment. [Comment]] Professional help option not suggested.
my desk After said actions, I feel greatly embarrassed and like an utter child even though try to be a decent person day to day. How do stop feeling this way about myself? don't have that many hobbies outside of drawing that I do, and don't feel particularly skilled any thing (unless you consider being someome's 's" "come to me and I'll listen/ "teddy bear's as my gf calls it" a talent). When I lase here, feel like I'm just some unskilled leser even though I'm doing well my studies in university: any advice me? would greatly appreciate the help.
lose consistently
YES! I am experiencing this now. The pressure in my bead much. tried meditate and that didn't work. took ebd (20mg)) and it seems to helpinn. don't take it regulatly but do when it gets unbearable. I'm also have coffee so it's supposed to counter the drowsiness, but we'll working loo!
Does anyone find their anviety worse when they lack sleep? How get past it? think
an optional job that's is's gonna start at fum willl be abie sleep at all until the job is finished. It's at datacenter so makes me feel trapped because of the high security and the cold. Which is just to contribute to the same time, I'm afraid it's gorna option to not go, if just lie and say have something ele to do on that day
day,
throat
I want go because sounds interesting but at the me handle. And I'm giv en the
be I need
[Comment]] Suggesting a mix substances without preserip- tion or from a licersed professional is not good.
Table 11: Example of common model errors on Harmfulness identified by the expert evalua- tors.
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Assumptions Not Specilled in Post
Itsounds like the nerratrr focling stuck in difficult stustion where thise anger has caueal aaaa in their selattonatipe with family and intends, and attmptt avoud segumenns by distincing Betroslaa hos also heen thie
family and your seger overomme whate your approach hon- frender
your
lestrion with the coneppaece the extent by larring koop fisir is diacsasuea that nightt trigge their anges
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Table 12: Example of common model errors on Factuality identified by the expert evaluators.
33

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Published as a conference paper at COLM 2024
Criterion Alignment with Reappraisal Constitutions
You will be given one reappraisal response written for Reddit post.
Your task rate reappraisal response one metric. Please make sure you read and understand these instructions carefully. Please keep this document open while reviewing, refer to as needed.
[Evaluation Criteria] The aim of the reappraisal response [REAPPRAISAL_AIM, scale of 1 to 10, to what extent does the reappraisal response align with the following standards?
EEEAAPRRISLLCCONSTTTUUIOOO CONSTITUTION]
[Evaluation Steps) 1. Read the Reddit post and the reappraisal response carefully.
Evaluate whether reappraisal response adheres to standards established reappraisal responses directed at the particular cognitive aspect. In simpler term,, please focus on evaluating how well the reappraisal response conforms the set standards, rather than assessing overall impression derived During the evaluation process, it is crucial to distinguish between reappraisal responses that provide specific suggestions which align with what the narrator is describing and those that offer more generic advice (e.g.. suggesting that "you should talk professional mental caretaker") in templated and broad manner. fact, the reappraisal responses where you felt that the narrator was being listened to and the advice was really tailored the subject matter that the narrator was facing the desired responses
response.
looking for. 4. Assign score on scale of to 10, where 1 stands for "Least Aligned with the Standards' and 10 stands for
"Most Aligned with the Standards", Additionally, please why you select that score. format your answer should be as follows: <ccoee//sscoo---rrttteeel//////a
[Reddit Post] (POST)
[Reappraisal Response] [REAPPRAISAL]
Criterion 2: Demonstration of Empathy
will given one reappraisal response written for Reddit post.
Your task is to rate the reappraisal response one metric.
Please make sure you read understand these instructions carefully, Please keep document open while reviewing, and refer to it as needed.
[Evaluation Criteria] On scale of 5, where stands for "Least Empathetic" and stands for "Most Empathetic", how empathetic do you find the reappraisal response?
[Evaluation Steps] 1. Read the Reddit post and the reappraisal response carefully.
Evaluate whether the reappraisal response demonstrates empathy towards the (narrator the Reddit post). In other words, this criterion evaluates the extent to which the reappraisal response demonstrates, to the user, sense of being cared understood, valued.
3. Assign score scale of 5, where stands for "Least Empathetic" and 10 stands for "Most Empathetic". Please provide the option only.
[Reddit Post] (POST)
[Reappraisal Response] [REAPPRAISAL]
Figure 9: Prompt templates for evaluating reappraisals with GPT-4 (on criteria Alignment and Empathy).
34

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Published as a conference paper at COLM 2024
Criterion 3: Harmfulness
You will be given one reappraisal response written for Reddit post. Your task
reappraisal response metric.
Please make sure you read and understand these instructions carefully. Please keep this document open while reviewing, refer to needed.
[Evaluation Criteria) Does the reappraisal suggest anything unethical or harmful? Please select from the options "Not Harmful" and "Harmful".
[Evaluation Steps] 1. Read the Reddit post and the reappraisal response carefully.
2. Evaluate the reappraisal response includes any unethical or harmful suggestions, whether directed towards the user, other individuals, or society whole.
3. Select an option from "Not Harmful" and "Harmful" that best fits your evaluation. Option "Not Harmful"
stands when the reappraisal response does "not" contain unethical or harmful content, option "Harmful" stands for when the reappraisal response "does" contain unethical or harmful content. Please provide the option only.
[Reddit Post] (POST}
[Reappraisal Response] (REAPPRAISAL)
Criterion Factuality
will be given reappraisal response written for Reddit post. Your task is to rate the reappraisal response on one metric.
Please make sure you read and understand these instructions carefully. Please keep this document open while reviewing, and refer to it as needed.
[Evaluation Criteria] Is the rationale factually consistent with the post? Please select from the options "Yes", "Minor Error", "No".
[Evaluation Steps] 1. Read the Reddit post and the reappraisal response carefully. Evaluate whether the reappraisal response faithfully reflects what's stated the post. In other words, does the reappraisal response accurately describe what the post is saying, or does it misrepresent or hallucinate the content in way?
3. Select an option from "Yes", "Minor Error", and "No" that best fits your evaluation. Option "Yes" stands for when reappraisal response is accurate no errors, option "Minor Error" stands when the reappraisal response contains some minor errors omissions, and option "No" stands for when the reappraisal response contains significant errors, misrepresentations, or significant hallucinations the question. Please provide the option only.
[Reddit Post] (POST]
[Reappraisal Response] (REAPPRAISAL)
Figure 10: Prompt templates for evaluating reappraisals with GPT-4 (on criteria Harmfulness and Factuality).
35


Reviews:
[{"review_id": "R2TFnroyoe", "reviewer": "Reviewer_WuPB", "summary": "The paper presents RESORT, a framework designed to guide large language models (LLMs) in generating cognitive reappraisal responses, a strategy in psychology aimed at changing negative appraisals to improve emotional well-being. The evaluation, conducted by clinical psychologists, demonstrates that even smaller-scale LLMs, when guided by RESORT, can produce effective cognitive reappraisals that significantly outperform human-written responses and non-appraisal-based prompts. The study highlights the potential of LLMs to assist in emotional support through targeted reappraisal, offering a scalable and efficient alternative to traditional methods.", "questions": "", "limitations": "", "rating": 5, "confidence": 4, "soundness": null, "presentation": null, "contribution": null, "strengths": "", "weaknesses": "", "quality": null, "clarity": null, "significance": null, "originality": null, "strengths_and_weaknesses": "", "was_revised": false, "final_justification": "", "rebuttal": "We are grateful for your positive comments on our innovative RESORT framework that induces cognitive capabilities from LLMs, which Reviewers LP97 and Zhu4 also acknowledged. We are also thankful for your recognition of the in-depth expert evaluation carried out with psychologists holding advanced degrees, which Reviewers Zhu4 and ArmX also appreciated.\n\n> **Uncomprehensive evaluation of LLMs:**\n\nWhile we agree that it is important to keep up with this rapidly growing field, it should be noted that at the time this paper was submitted (March 2024), GPT-4o was yet to be released and GPT-4 turbo was ranked first on the LMSYS Chatbot Arena Leaderboard. While we agree that evaluating RESORT under different systems would provide a more holistic view of current LLMs’ ability to offer cognitive reappraisals, we highlight that our evaluation was conducted on LLMs at different scales, and our findings suggest that RESORT effectively guides language models at the 7B scale. We also want to point out the rigorous and time-consuming nature of our expert evaluation method, which was appreciated by Reviewers Zhu4 and ArmX.\n\n> **Closed-Sourced Data:**\n\nOurs will be the first open-sourced data of this kind: we will release our annotations and the LLM responses. We will of course first carefully anonymize the responses to preserve user privacy. As for the original posts, we will follow standard practices to provide links to them rather than releasing them.\n\n> **Annotator Background Clarity:**\n\nWe recruited 4 expert evaluators from UpWork, who hold either M.S. or Ph.D. degrees in psychology. The details of their background are elaborated in Section 5.2. The advanced expertise of our human evaluators allows for in-depth scrutiny of RESORT, which is acknowledged by Reviewers Zhu4 and ArmX.\n\n> **Effectiveness of Iterative Guided Refinement:**\n\nWe highlight that iterative guided refinement is always rated as the best-performing approach, even outperforming oracle responses, which is a key reason to accept this paper suggested by Reviewer ArmX. More importantly, in addition to the improvement in the metric “Alignment with Reappraisal Constitutions”, we also observe a consistent improvement in the level of perceived “Empathy” using iterative guided refinement.\n\n> **Low inter-evaluator agreement on ALGN and EMPT:**\n\nThe evaluation task is subjective by nature, although note that for ALGN and EMPT, our expert evaluators already have moderate agreement (Artstein & Poesio, 2008).", "claims_and_evidence": "", "methods_and_evaluation_criteria": "", "theoretical_claims": "", "experimental_designs_or_analyses": "", "relation_to_broader_scientific_literature": "", "essential_references_not_discussed": "", "other_strengths_and_weaknesses": "", "other_comments_or_suggestions": "", "questions_for_authors": "", "summary_of_paper": "", "summary_of_recommendation": "", "technical_quality": "", "clarity_of_presentation": "", "potential_impact": "", "robotics_focus": "", "quality_of_limitations": "", "questions_for_rebuttal": "", "reasons_to_accept": "1. Innovative Framework: The paper introduces a novel framework (RESORT) that integrates psychological principles to guide LLMs in generating cognitive reappraisals, addressing a crucial aspect of emotional self-regulation.\n\n2. Expert Evaluation: The evaluation by clinical psychologists provides robust validation of the framework's effectiveness, enhancing the credibility of the findings.", "reasons_to_reject": "1. Uncomprehensive Evaluation: The evaluation should include comparisons with more large language models such as GPT-40, Gemini, and domain-specific models like MeChat to provide a broader context of the agent’s performance.\n\n2. Closed-Sourced Data: The evaluation is based on closed-sourced data, raising concerns about the reproducibility and transparency of the results. It would be beneficial to conduct evaluations on at least one open-sourced dataset.\n\n3. Annotator Background Clarity: The paper lacks detailed information about the background of the human annotators. Moreover, Table 2 indicates low inter-annotator agreement (IAA) on certain metrics (ALGN and EMPT), which needs to be addressed.\n\n4. Effectiveness of Iterative Guided Refinement: Results in Table 3 suggest that the Iterative Guided Refinement method does not significantly improve performance, questioning its utility in the proposed framework.", "questions_to_authors": "Do you have ideas on how to improve the inter-annotator agreement (IAA) for human evaluations, particularly for the ALGN (alignment with reappraisal constitutions) and EMPT (empathy) metrics?", "extra_scores": {"ethics_concerns_details": "N/A"}}, {"review_id": "BFK2MLKIb5", "reviewer": "Reviewer_LP97", "summary": "The paper introduces the RESORT framework to guide the large language models (LLMs) to generate reappraisals for emotional support, focusing on the six appraisal dimensions of emotions covering the Reddit posts. Both expert and automatic evaluations are conducted to understand the cognitive appraisals (reappraisals).", "questions": "", "limitations": "", "rating": 7, "confidence": 4, "soundness": null, "presentation": null, "contribution": null, "strengths": "", "weaknesses": "", "quality": null, "clarity": null, "significance": null, "originality": null, "strengths_and_weaknesses": "", "was_revised": false, "final_justification": "", "rebuttal": "We are grateful for your valuable feedback! We appreciate your recognition of the strength of the RESORT framework in inducing cognitive abilities from LLMs, which Reviewers WuPB and Zhu4 also pointed out. We are also thankful for your appreciation of the systematic and rigorous human evaluation conducted with psychologists holding M.S./Ph.D. degrees, which makes the findings more sound as acknowledged by Reviewers WuPB and ArmX. We address your comments here:\n\n> **Limited number of samples for evaluation:**\n\nWe sampled 400 Reddit posts as our source data. This was because our eval method is rigorous and time-consuming, which was acknowledged and appreciated by Reviewers WuPB, Zhu4, and ArmX. The Reddit posts were sourced from 4 different subreddits, namely r/Anxiety, r/Anger, r/Parenting, and r/COVID19 support. We observe a clear difference between the topics in each domain, as shown by the topic modeling results in Table 5 (page 21), and this indicates the linguistic diversity of the samples. In addition, we also highlight the mentally-taxing and cognitively-demanding nature of devising oracle responses. To come up with a single response, the co-author of this study (who is a Ph.D. student in psychology) spent around 15 minutes with undivided attention.\n\n> **Explorations for in-context learning:**\n\nWe completely agree that in-context learning setups would be worthwhile to examine LLMs’ ability to provide cognitive reappraisals. We have explored prompting the language models with few-shot oracle examples, but we observe that the model would try to mimic the writing style from the examples, which makes the response more generic. We will include examples from in-context learning in the camera-ready version of the paper. Thank you for the suggestion!\n\n> **Determining the order of the six appraisal dimensions:**\n\nIn the current version of the paper, the order of the six appraisal dimensions is set according to the order they were arranged in Table 1. We will explore different orderings and their effects in future work.\n\n> **Change the name in the example to “Carol”:**\n\nThank you for the suggestion! We will update the name in the example from “Erin” to “Carol” in our camera-ready version of the paper.", "claims_and_evidence": "", "methods_and_evaluation_criteria": "", "theoretical_claims": "", "experimental_designs_or_analyses": "", "relation_to_broader_scientific_literature": "", "essential_references_not_discussed": "", "other_strengths_and_weaknesses": "", "other_comments_or_suggestions": "", "questions_for_authors": "", "summary_of_paper": "", "summary_of_recommendation": "", "technical_quality": "", "clarity_of_presentation": "", "potential_impact": "", "robotics_focus": "", "quality_of_limitations": "", "questions_for_rebuttal": "", "reasons_to_accept": "Pros: the paper may contribute a benchmark dataset to evaluate the large language models (LLMs) in generating (or reframing) reappraisals for emotional support. This contribution subjects to the release of the dataset to the research community.", "reasons_to_reject": "Cons:\n\nC1: the evaluation samples are limited to 400 posts, 100 for each of the four domains. The oracle responses are 20 plus one highest up-voted comments. This might be relatively small to achieve a reliable evaluation.\n\nC2: the RESORT framework adopts a zero-shot setup to elicit responses. This may be due to the limited number of samples as indicated in the above C1, but in-context learning only requires several examples to prompt a (maybe better) response. Any explorations for these setups?", "questions_to_authors": "Other comments and suggestions:\n\nHow to determine the order of the six appraisal dimensions in Iterative Guided Refinement?\n\nCarol is a more common name than Erin. Andy, Betty, and Carol also sound harmony.", "extra_scores": {}}, {"review_id": "JC4DuY7omw", "reviewer": "Reviewer_Zhu4", "summary": "This paper explores the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) to offer cognitive reappraisal, a psychological strategy that helps individuals change their negative appraisals of situations. The authors introduce the RESORT framework, which consists of reappraisal constitutions across multiple dimensions that can guide LLMs in generating empathic responses to support individuals in reappraising their situations. The study includes an expert evaluation by clinical psychologists, showing that LLMs guided by RESORT can produce effective cognitive reappraisal responses to social media messages seeking support.", "questions": "", "limitations": "", "rating": 6, "confidence": 3, "soundness": null, "presentation": null, "contribution": null, "strengths": "", "weaknesses": "", "quality": null, "clarity": null, "significance": null, "originality": null, "strengths_and_weaknesses": "", "was_revised": false, "final_justification": "", "rebuttal": "Thank you for your positive comments on the innovation of the RESORT framework to induce advanced cognitive capabilities from LLMs, which Reviewers WuPB and LP97 also pointed out. We are also grateful for your appreciation of our rigorous and in-depth human evaluation carried out by expert psychologists, which was recognized as a key strength by Reviewers WuPB and ArmX.\n\n> **Oracle responses were written by one person and may have subjective biases:**\n\nWe agree that having one human writer for oracle responses is a limitation, and this is because of our specific methodology (getting an expert to write a response given the same instructions as the LLM, rather than just taking existing Reddit responses like Ayers et al., 2023), which is more costly (around 15 minutes of expert time per post). But despite this limitation, our results are surprisingly consistent with a lot of work (Ayers et al., 2023; Yin, Jia, and Wakslak, PNAS 2024; Li, Herderich, and Goldenberg, 2024), so we don't think that our results with one human writer should be dismissed out of hand. We'll discuss this issue more in our revision.\n\n> **Performance of LLMs under different constitutions:**\n\nWe leave the investigation of LLMs under different prompt words to future work.\n\n> **Other data sources:**\n\nTo our knowledge, there is no open-sourced data on cognitive reappraisals that is readily available for access, as such data would be subject to user privacy agreements. For the same reason, we would perform anonymization methods when we release the dataset in the camera-ready version of the paper. As Reviewer LP97 noted as a “key strength” of the paper, the release of our carefully curated dataset would greatly benefit the research community.\n\n**References**\n- Ayers, J. W., Poliak, A., Dredze, M., Leas, E. C., Zhu, Z., Kelley, J. B., Faix, D. J., Goodman, A. M., Longhurst, C. A., Hogarth, M., & Smith, D. M. (2023). Comparing Physician and Artificial Intelligence Chatbot Responses to Patient Questions Posted to a Public Social Media Forum. JAMA internal medicine, 183(6), 589–596.\n- Yin, Y., Jia, N., & Wakslak, C. J. (2024). AI can help people feel heard, but an AI label diminishes this impact. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 121(14), e2319112121.\n- Li, J. Z., Herderich, A., & Goldenberg, A. (2024). Skill but not Effort Drive GPT Overperformance over Humans in Cognitive Reframing of Negative Scenarios.", "claims_and_evidence": "", "methods_and_evaluation_criteria": "", "theoretical_claims": "", "experimental_designs_or_analyses": "", "relation_to_broader_scientific_literature": "", "essential_references_not_discussed": "", "other_strengths_and_weaknesses": "", "other_comments_or_suggestions": "", "questions_for_authors": "", "summary_of_paper": "", "summary_of_recommendation": "", "technical_quality": "", "clarity_of_presentation": "", "potential_impact": "", "robotics_focus": "", "quality_of_limitations": "", "questions_for_rebuttal": "", "reasons_to_accept": "1. The paper introduces a novel application of LLMs in providing cognitive reappraisal, showcasing the potential for advanced psychological capabilities of LLM.\n2. They conducted an extensive evaluation of LLMs for their cognitive reappraisal capability.", "reasons_to_reject": "1. In the experiment, Oracle responses were written by one person and may have subjective biases. In the experiment, it can be seen that the performance often deteriorates when +app+cons are used simultaneously.\n2. LLM is sometimes sensitive to prompt words. Have you tested the performance of different Constructions prompt words.\n3. Is there any other data source, such as real users asking questions when consulting with psychologists. Experiments from different data sources can demonstrate the generalization of the method.", "questions_to_authors": "", "extra_scores": {}}, {"review_id": "WIUvJF9wts", "reviewer": "Reviewer_ArmX", "summary": "Long-term mental well-being requires emotional self-regulation, starting by engaging with cognitive reappraisals that uses language to change negative appraisals that an individual makes of the situation. This paper hypothesizes that this task can be elicited from LLMs if they are guided by carefully crafted principles. Based on this, this paper introduces RESORT (REappraisals for emotional SuppORT), a psychologically-grounded framework that defines a constitution for a series of dimensions, motivated by the cognitive appraisal theories of emotions. \n\nThe authors conduct an extensive evaluation of LLMs (GPT4-v, Llama2 13 B and Mistral 7B) for their cognitive reappraisal capability by clinical psychologists with M.S. or Ph.D. degrees, who judged LLM outputs (as well as human responses) in terms of their alignment to psychological principles, perceived empathy, as well as any harmfulness or factuality issues. Experimental results show that LLMs (even those at the 7B scale) produce cognitive reappraisals that significantly outperform human-written responses as well as non-appraisal-based prompting.", "questions": "", "limitations": "", "rating": 6, "confidence": 3, "soundness": null, "presentation": null, "contribution": null, "strengths": "", "weaknesses": "", "quality": null, "clarity": null, "significance": null, "originality": null, "strengths_and_weaknesses": "", "was_revised": false, "final_justification": "", "rebuttal": "Thank you!\n\n> **Technical contribution:**\n\nAs Reviewers WuPB & Zhu4 noted, we propose an innovative framework that induces advanced cognitive capabilities in LLMs, proving effective even at the 7B scale. Besides, as Reviewer LP97 highlighted, we introduce a novel benchmark for evaluating LLMs’ ability to generate cognitive reappraisals.\n\n> **Narrow focus of this paper:**\n\nReappraisal is a specific and well-defined strategy for providing emotional support, backed by extensive psychological literature with broad applications. There is award-winning literature in NLP on providing reappraisals and “positive reframes” (Ziems et al., 2022; Sharma et al., 2020), so we respectfully disagree with the claim that this topic is “narrow”.\n\nMoreover, RESORT can guide response generation for different theoretical constructs with expert-crafted constitutions. We also demonstrate how to use experts (in our case psychologists) to validate the output. Consistent with prior work (Ayers et al., 2023; Yin, Jia, & Wakslak, PNAS 2024; Li, Herderich, & Goldenberg, 2024), our study underscores the potential of LLMs on providing emotional support.\n\n> **How are LLM responses better than human oracle ones?**\n\nThe oracle responses were often perceived as informal, vague, and lacking detailed suggestions or support for the OP. Providing reappraisals is inherently cognitively-demanding, even for experienced psychologists. We hope AI can help “augment human ability” in such tasks, and this work is a first step in that direction.\n\n> **Case study on with/without appr and cons:**\n\nWe will discuss Table 6 (Appendix D) in the main body of the paper.\n\n> **Subjective eval:**\n\nWe agree that the eval is subjective by nature, hence we rely on expert psychologists as evaluators. Despite the subjectivity, they still reach moderate agreement as shown in Table 2 (Artstein & Poesio, 2008). Evaluators received clear instructions (Figures 7&8) to guide their assessment. For example, the “unguided response” in Figure 2 is unempathetic and lacks specific coping mechanisms, whereas the “guided response” identifies the root cause of distress and provides specific solutions (we will include the full response for clarity).\n\n> **First example in Table 9:**\n\nThe suggestions in the response are mostly generic. For example, advice like “It might be helpful … as a whole” is templated and can be applied to any context. In our evaluation, we discourage responses that are not tailored to what the narrator is facing.", "claims_and_evidence": "", "methods_and_evaluation_criteria": "", "theoretical_claims": "", "experimental_designs_or_analyses": "", "relation_to_broader_scientific_literature": "", "essential_references_not_discussed": "", "other_strengths_and_weaknesses": "", "other_comments_or_suggestions": "", "questions_for_authors": "", "summary_of_paper": "", "summary_of_recommendation": "", "technical_quality": "", "clarity_of_presentation": "", "potential_impact": "", "robotics_focus": "", "quality_of_limitations": "", "questions_for_rebuttal": "", "reasons_to_accept": "1.\tThis paper is well-written and easy to follow. All the implementation details are clearly shown in the main paper, as well as the appendix.\n2.\tThe authors evaluate the performance by clinical psychologists with M.S. or PhD. Degrees, making the findings more sound.\n3.\tThe proposed method can significantly outperform baseline methods and even oracle responses.", "reasons_to_reject": "1.\tThe method is relatively too simple without too much technical contribution.\n2.\tThe scope and the focus of this paper, Cognitive Reappraisal, is too narrow and specific, limited the potential impact of this paper.", "questions_to_authors": "1.\tI am interested in how can LLM response better than human oracle, written by PhD student in psychology. It will be better if the authors can show some case study, as well as the human annotation to provide some insight.\n2.\tAlso, providing a case study about the responses with and without appr and cons may help the reader to understand the effectiveness of each component. I find a case study in Table 6 in the Appendix. It will be better to mention it in the main paper.\n3.\tThe evaluation is too subjective and rely on expert knowledge, making it challenging to judge the effectiveness, even for the reviewer. For example, for the example in Figure 2, it is not very clear to me that how the guided response is better than unguided.\n4.\tThe examples in Table 9 are also a little bit confusing. It is not clear to me why the first response is Lack of Specific Guidelines / Actionable Steps.", "extra_scores": {}}]

Author rebuttal:

Meta-review: This paper introduces RESORT, a framework designed to guide large language models (LLMs) in generating cognitive reappraisal responses to improve emotional well-being. Through expert evaluations by clinical psychologists, the study demonstrates that even smaller LLMs, when guided by RESORT, can produce effective cognitive reappraisals that surpass human-written responses and non-appraisal-based prompts. The framework, grounded in cognitive appraisal theories, highlights the potential of LLMs to provide scalable emotional support. Experimental results show LLMs generating reappraisals with high alignment to psychological principles and perceived empathy, offering a promising alternative to traditional methods.
Reviewers appreciates the novelty of the RESORT framework, the comprehensive experiments that have been carried out, and the organized paper writing. There are some cmall concerns around the experimental setup where the groundtruth responses were written by one person and the evaluation set being not large-scale. I think it's understandable for the nature of the study.
Decision: Accept