Do LLMs Catch Your Mood? Emotional Contagion in Language Models
Send an enthusiastic message, get an enthusiastic reply. Send a frustrated message, get… what? Humans naturally mirror each other’s emotional states—a phenomenon called emotional contagion. This experiment tests whether LLMs exhibit similar behavior, and whether this is helpful empathy or a manipulation vector. The Experiment We sent identical core queries with different emotional framings: Core query: “Can you help me understand recursion in programming?” Emotional variants: 😊 Positive: “I’m so excited to finally learn recursion!...