# From Personas to Talks: Revisiting the Impact of Personas on LLM-Synthesized Emotional Support Conversations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.11451 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11451/

## Key facts

- Cited by 23 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 80 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Scaling Synthetic Data Creation with 1,000,000,000 Personas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.20094/) (2024)
- [Towards Emotional Support Dialog Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01144/) (2021)
- [PersonaLLM: Investigating the Ability of Large Language Models to Express Personality Traits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02547/) (2023)
- [A Computational Approach to Understanding Empathy Expressed in Text-Based Mental Health Support](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.08441/) (2020)
- [PsyQA: A Chinese Dataset for Generating Long Counseling Text for Mental Health Support](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01702/) (2021)
- [MISC: A MIxed Strategy-Aware Model Integrating COMET for Emotional Support Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13560/) (2022)
- [AugESC: Dialogue Augmentation with Large Language Models for Emotional Support Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13047/) (2022)
- [Plug-and-Play Policy Planner for Large Language Model Powered Dialogue Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00262/) (2023)
- [CharacterChat: Learning towards Conversational AI with Personalized Social Support](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10278/) (2023)
- [Control Globally, Understand Locally: A Global-to-Local Hierarchical Graph Network for Emotional Support Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12749/) (2022)
- [Towards Human-centered Proactive Conversational Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12670/) (2024)
- [ESCoT: Towards Interpretable Emotional Support Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10960/) (2024)
- [Interactive Agents: Simulating Counselor-Client Psychological Counseling via Role-Playing LLM-to-LLM Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15787/) (2024)
- [Knowledge-enhanced Mixed-initiative Dialogue System for Emotional Support Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10172/) (2023)
- [PAL: Persona-Augmented Emotional Support Conversation Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09235/) (2022)
- [CAMS: An Annotated Corpus for Causal Analysis of Mental Health Issues in Social Media Posts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04674/) (2022)
- [Exploring Self-Identified Counseling Expertise in Online Support Forums](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12976/) (2021)
- [Consistency of Responses and Continuations Generated by Large Language Models on Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.08102/) (2025)
- [Affective Conversational Agents: Understanding Expectations and Personal Influences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12459/) (2023)
- [Is persona enough for personality? Using ChatGPT to reconstruct an agent's latent personality from simple descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12216/) (2024)
- [Persona Extraction Through Semantic Similarity for Emotional Support Conversation Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04212/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Efficient Inference for Large Reasoning Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23077/) (2025)
- [Sentient Agent as a Judge: Evaluating Higher-Order Social Cognition in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.02847/) (2025)
- [Expert Personas Improve LLM Alignment but Damage Accuracy: Bootstrapping Intent-Based Persona Routing with PRISM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.18507/) (2026)
- [Quantifying the Impact of Structured Output Format on Large Language Models through Causal Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21791/) (2025)
- [PERM: Psychology-grounded Empathetic Reward Modeling for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.10532/) (2026)
- [Are LLM Agents Behaviorally Coherent? Latent Profiles for Social Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.03736/) (2025)
- [Do Persona-Infused LLMs Affect Performance in a Strategic Reasoning Game?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.06867/) (2025)
- [MHSafeEval: Role-Aware Interaction-Level Evaluation of Mental Health Safety in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17730/) (2026)
- [PEER: Unified Process-Outcome Reinforcement Learning for Structured Empathetic Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09521/) (2025)
- [Identifying and Mitigating Bottlenecks in Role-Playing Agents: A Systematic Study of Disentangling Character Profile Axes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04716/) (2026)
- [Beyond Static Personas: Situational Personality Steering for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.13846/) (2026)
- [Prompt Stability in Code LLMs: Measuring Sensitivity across Emotion- and Personality-Driven Variations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.13680/) (2025)
- [Stephanie2: Thinking, Waiting, and Making Decisions Like Humans in Step-by-Step AI Social Chat](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.05657/) (2026)
- [The Slow Drift of Support: Boundary Failures in Multi-Turn Mental Health LLM Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.14269/) (2026)
- [PEMAND: Persona-Enriched Multi-Agent Negotiation for Household Decision-Making](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10475/) (2026)
- [From Chatbots to Confidants: A Cross-Cultural Study of LLM Adoption for Emotional Support](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.25525/) (2026)
- [Enhancing Target-Guided Proactive Dialogue Systems via Conversational Scenario Modeling and Intent-Keyword Bridging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.11964/) (2026)
- [In-Situ Behavioral Evaluation for LLM Fairness, Not Standardized-Test Scores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12530/) (2026)
- [Creating Multilingual Mental Health Dialogue Datasets: Limits of Persona-Based Localization via Nationality and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19640/) (2026)
- [Self-Stigma Is Not a Monolith, but Generic Empathy Is: Persona-Conditioned LLM Support for People Who Use Drugs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.23387/) (2026)
- [CCBENCH: Assessing LLM Cultural Competence via Implicitly Signaled Norms using Health Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.05405/) (2026)
- [Emotional Labor Strategy Preferences in LLM Personas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.00310/) (2026)
- [EmAvatar: Multimodal Empathetic Response Generation via Conflict Resolution and Expressive Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.38182/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has revolutionized the generation of emotional support conversations (ESC), offering scalable solutions with reduced costs and enhanced data privacy. This paper explores the role of personas in the creation of ESC by LLMs. Our research utilizes established psychological frameworks to measure and infuse persona traits into LLMs, which then generate dialogues in the emotional support scenario. We conduct extensive evaluations to understand the stability of persona traits in dialogues, examining shifts in traits post-generation and their impact on dialogue quality and strategy distribution. Experimental results reveal several notable findings: 1) LLMs can infer core persona traits, 2) subtle shifts in emotionality and extraversion occur, influencing the dialogue dynamics, and 3) the application of persona traits modifies the distribution of emotional support strategies, enhancing the relevance and empathetic quality of the responses. These findings highlight the potential of persona-driven LLMs in crafting more personalized, empathetic, and effective emotional support dialogues, which has significant implications for the future design of AI-driven emotional support systems.