Large Language Models Understand and Can be Enhanced by Emotional Stimuli · HackerPapers discussions

Large Language Models Understand and Can be Enhanced by Emotional Stimuli — mentioned by pedrosorio

Fri, 22 May 2026 13:36:26 GMT

Yes. And this has been long known. 2023 paper - https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.11760 https://jurgengravestein.substack.com/p/why-you-should-total... > A recent study by the Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Microsoft, and others, suggest that the performance of LLMs can be enhanced through emotional appeal. > Examples include phrases like “This is very important to my career” and “Stay determined and keep moving forward”. Of course the top LLMs change every few months, so your mileage may vary.

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Large Language Models Understand and Can be Enhanced by Emotional Stimuli — mentioned by stingraycharles

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 07:46:51 GMT

I actually have a prompt optimizer skill that does exactly this. https://github.com/solatis/claude-config It’s based entirely off academic research, and a LOT of research has been done in this area. One of the papers you may be interested in is “emotion prompting”, eg “it is super important for me that you do X” etc actually works. “Large Language Models Understand and Can be Enhanced by Emotional Stimuli” https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.11760

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Large Language Models Understand and Can be Enhanced by Emotional Stimuli — mentioned by winwang

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 03:32:24 GMT

Apparently LLM quality is sensitive to emotional stimuli? "Large Language Models Understand and Can be Enhanced by Emotional Stimuli": https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.11760

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Large Language Models Understand and Can be Enhanced by Emotional Stimuli — mentioned by belter

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 13:41:48 GMT

Its seems you are supposed to make the model feel some anxiety for better performance: "Large Language Models Understand and Can Be Enhanced by Emotional Stimuli" - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.11760

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Large Language Models Understand and Can be Enhanced by Emotional Stimuli — mentioned by famouswaffles

Fri, 03 Jan 2025 17:54:16 GMT

>If the latter were the case then one could get the best version on first attempt by telling it your grandmother's life was on the line or whatever. Setting aside the fact that "best" is ambiguous, why would this get you the best version ? If you told a human this, you wouldn't be guaranteed to get the best version at all. You would probably get a better version sure but that would be the case for LLMs as well. You will often get improvements with emotionally charged statements even if there's nothing to iterate on (i.e re-running a benchmark with an emotion prompt added)…

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Large Language Models Understand and Can be Enhanced by Emotional Stimuli — mentioned by dakotasmith

Sat, 26 Oct 2024 00:55:34 GMT

Large Language Models Understand and Can Be Enhanced by Emotional Stimuli https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.11760

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Large Language Models Understand and Can be Enhanced by Emotional Stimuli — mentioned by portaouflop

Fri, 26 Jan 2024 11:28:48 GMT

Being nice to LLMs improves performance so I always say please and thank you: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.11760

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Large Language Models Understand and Can be Enhanced by Emotional Stimuli — mentioned by coder543

Wed, 17 Jan 2024 15:17:17 GMT

I'm not the person you're replying to, but that sentence comes from this research: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.11760

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Large Language Models Understand and Can be Enhanced by Emotional Stimuli — HN submission

Sun, 03 Dec 2023 15:09:54 GMT

Large Language Models Understand and Can Be Enhanced by Emotional Stimuli

2 points; 0 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

Large Language Models Understand and Can be Enhanced by Emotional Stimuli — HN submission

Sat, 02 Dec 2023 22:49:23 GMT

Large Language Models Understand and Can Be Enhanced by Emotional Stimuli

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Large Language Models Understand and Can be Enhanced by Emotional Stimuli — mentioned by andrelaszlo

Tue, 28 Nov 2023 01:39:18 GMT

I guess it doesn't actually do more passes but pretending that it did might still give more precise results. There was an article recently that said something like adding urgency to a prompt gave better results. I hope it doesn't stress the model out :D https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.11760

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Large Language Models Understand and Can be Enhanced by Emotional Stimuli — mentioned by kromem

Tue, 21 Nov 2023 05:55:21 GMT

A recent paper along these lines you might be interested in was Large Language Models Understand and Can be Enhanced by Emotional Stimuli: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.11760 It makes complete sense and has been a part of my own usage for well over a year now, but it's been cool seeing it demonstrated in research across multiple models.

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Large Language Models Understand and Can be Enhanced by Emotional Stimuli — mentioned by gwern

Wed, 15 Nov 2023 22:21:20 GMT

> Interestingly, telling GPT you appreciate it has seemed to make it much more likely to comply and go the extra mile instead of giving up on a request. This is not as absurd as it sounds, even though it isn't clear that it ought to work under ordinary Internet-text prompt engineering or under RLHF incentives, but it does seem that you can 'coerce' or 'incentivize' the model to 'work harder': in addition to the anecdotal evidence (I too have noticed that it seems to work a bit better if I'm polite), recently there was https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.11760#microsoft…

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Large Language Models Understand and Can be Enhanced by Emotional Stimuli — HN submission

Tue, 14 Nov 2023 17:19:55 GMT

Telling ChatGPT it does well increases performance

3 points; 2 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

Large Language Models Understand and Can be Enhanced by Emotional Stimuli — mentioned by famouswaffles

Mon, 13 Nov 2023 23:34:40 GMT

>Because an LLM doesn't simulate the brain. That's pretty moot. You don't need a human brain anyone than a plane needs feathers and to flap wings to fly. >Fatigue isn't being modeled. Instead, the predictive text as the result of that fatigue is being models. Emotion is definitely being modelled. There's nothing random about anything that's happened. Train on protein sequences alone and biological structure and function emerge in the inner layers alone. It doesn't matter that those things are not explicitly stated in the data. Because they implicitly structure it, it gets learnt.…

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Large Language Models Understand and Can be Enhanced by Emotional Stimuli — mentioned by famouswaffles

Tue, 07 Nov 2023 18:43:18 GMT

Siri, Alexa and Cortana all sucked. They simply weren't smart or robust enough for the whole personality thing to work. This has clearly changed. LLMs will literally perform better with emotionally fused text. https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.11760 Bing may be faceless and nameless but i assure you, it's definitely not personality-less. Character ai is very popular and is based on personality infused LLM instances. There is clearly a big market here. That Open ai try their best to train the personality out of their LLMs by default is not indication there isn't. https://beta.character.ai/…

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Large Language Models Understand and Can be Enhanced by Emotional Stimuli — HN submission

Sun, 05 Nov 2023 21:11:33 GMT

Large Language Models Understand and Can be Enhanced by Emotional Stimuli

2 points; 0 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

Large Language Models Understand and Can be Enhanced by Emotional Stimuli — HN submission

Sat, 04 Nov 2023 22:48:23 GMT

Large Language Models Understand and Can Be Enhanced by Emotional Stimuli

2 points; 1 discussion reply on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

Large Language Models Understand and Can be Enhanced by Emotional Stimuli — HN submission

Thu, 02 Nov 2023 23:05:03 GMT

Large Language Models Understand and Can Be Enhanced by Emotional Stimuli

3 points; 1 discussion reply on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

Large Language Models Understand and Can be Enhanced by Emotional Stimuli — mentioned by famouswaffles

Tue, 17 Oct 2023 23:29:30 GMT

It was GPT that wrote this. and it's primed by all the RLHF Open ai did to downplay these sort of abilities by default. There are a couple things here stated to instances of the differences between the two that a GPT can certainly do (like simulating different personas in a non trivial manner). Once, in response to a paper showing GPT could give more empathic responses than doctors to patients, someone essentially said "It's not real empathy. For real empathy, doctors would potentially have increased effort and not just bedside manners". Well "empathy" for LLMs is certainly not just limited…

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Large Language Models Understand and Can be Enhanced by Emotional Stimuli — mentioned by famouswaffles

Sat, 14 Oct 2023 23:00:53 GMT

Side effect or not, Stuff like this works https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.11760

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Large Language Models Understand and Can be Enhanced by Emotional Stimuli — mentioned by famouswaffles

Sat, 14 Oct 2023 22:59:21 GMT

Your loss https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.11760

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Large Language Models Understand and Can be Enhanced by Emotional Stimuli — HN submission

Thu, 05 Oct 2023 13:32:05 GMT

Large Language Models Understand and Can Be Enhanced by Emotional Stimuli [PDF]

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Large Language Models Understand and Can be Enhanced by Emotional Stimuli — mentioned by famouswaffles

Mon, 02 Oct 2023 20:46:06 GMT

Yes, emotional prompts will work. https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.11760 "This is very important to my career" taking 3.5 from 51 to 63% on a benchmark is pretty funny. Hey at least we can be rest assured a GPT-X super intelligence wouldn't off us following some goal to monkey paw specificity(sorry paperclip maximiser).

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Large Language Models Understand and Can be Enhanced by Emotional Stimuli — mentioned by famouswaffles

Mon, 02 Oct 2023 05:08:51 GMT

>then a lot of stuff is social engineering that we don't generally think of as being in that category? I mean..yes? Social Engineering is just the malicious manifestation of general social navigation. I mean think about it. What's the actual difference between a child who waits until his mother is in a good mood to ask for sweets and a rogue agent who gets chatty with the security guard so he can be close by without seeming suspicious. It's not a difference of kind. It's purely intent. >Even this example from Bing is kind of eliciting an emotional reaction, and I don't think the emotional…

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Large Language Models Understand and Can be Enhanced by Emotional Stimuli — HN submission

Fri, 29 Sep 2023 20:40:15 GMT

Large Language Models Understand and Can Be Enhanced by Emotional Stimuli

3 points; 0 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

Large Language Models Understand and Can be Enhanced by Emotional Stimuli — mentioned by famouswaffles

Fri, 29 Sep 2023 20:38:46 GMT

It's not like it has no effect. https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.11760

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Large Language Models Understand and Can be Enhanced by Emotional Stimuli — HN submission

Sun, 06 Aug 2023 16:56:40 GMT

Leveraging Psychology for Large Language Models Enhancement via Emotional Prompt

2 points; 0 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.