Scientists want to use LLMs to model human emotions and study human mental health
12:30 PM CDT on July 1, 2026
Despite thousands of years of study, the human mind and its maladies remain a great mystery. First came the philosophers, who developed detailed theories of perception, emotion, memory, and consciousness. Then came the psychologists and neuroscientists, who brought empirical methods and controlled observation. But we still have a fairly rudimentary understanding of how it all works. Experimenting on human subjects is complex because of the potential for harm, and anyway, humans often have limited insight into their own minds and a talent for hiding our thoughts. Studies of animals can only reveal so much: After all, they can’t tell us what they’re feeling.
What about chatbots, though? They’re not alive and do not feel in any traditional sense. But they’ve been trained on vast quantities of human data, and they can speak our language. Some researchers in Germany recently decided they might make excellent guinea pigs. They wanted to see if chatbots would respond to certain psychological prompts the way humans do: If they tried to induce the chatbots to feel sad or angry, how would they respond?
