# Psychology-driven LLM Agents for Explainable Panic Prediction on Social Media during Sudden Disaster Events

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.16455 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16455/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Social simulation and multi-agent debate, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 12 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 May 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Social simulation and multi-agent debate](https://mlsanity.com/agents/social-simulation-and-multi-agent-debate/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

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- [BERTweet: A pre-trained language model for English Tweets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10200/) (2020)
- [LLM Agents Grounded in Self-Reports Enable General-Purpose Simulation of Individuals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10109/) (2024)
- [Deep Predictive Coding Networks for Video Prediction and Unsupervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.08104/) (2016)
- [Reasoning Implicit Sentiment with Chain-of-Thought Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11255/) (2023)
- [Let the LLMs Talk: Simulating Human-to-Human Conversational QA via Zero-Shot LLM-to-LLM Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02913/) (2023)
- [ChatHaruhi: Reviving Anime Character in Reality via Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09597/) (2023)
- [Capturing Minds, Not Just Words: Enhancing Role-Playing Language Models with Personality-Indicative Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18921/) (2024)
- [Performance of Social Network Sensors During Hurricane Sandy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1402.2482/) (2014)
- [Enhancing Emotion Prediction in News Headlines: Insights from ChatGPT and Seq2Seq Models for Free-Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10091/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

During sudden disaster events, accurately predicting public panic sentiment on social media is crucial for proactive governance and crisis management. Current efforts on this problem face three main challenges: lack of finely annotated data hinders emotion prediction studies, unmodeled risk perception causes prediction inaccuracies, and insufficient interpretability of panic formation mechanisms. We address these issues by proposing a Psychology-driven generative Agent framework (PsychoAgent) for explainable panic prediction based on emotion arousal theory. Specifically, we first construct a fine-grained open panic emotion dataset (namely COPE) via human-large language models (LLMs) collaboration to mitigate semantic bias. Then, we develop a framework integrating cross-domain heterogeneous data grounded in psychological mechanisms to model risk perception and cognitive differences in emotion generation. To enhance interpretability, we design an LLM-based role-playing agent that simulates individual psychological chains through dedicatedly designed prompts. Experimental results on our annotated dataset show that PsychoAgent improves panic emotion prediction performance by 12.6% to 21.7% compared to baseline models. Furthermore, the explainability and generalization of our approach is validated. Crucially, this represents a paradigm shift from opaque "data-driven fitting" to transparent "role-based simulation with mechanistic interpretation" for panic emotion prediction during emergencies. Our implementation is publicly available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/PsychoAgent-19DD.