# Emotional Labor Strategy Preferences in LLM Personas

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.00310 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.00310/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [DeepSeek-V4: Towards Highly Efficient Million-Token Context Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19348/) (2026)
- [Ethical and social risks of harm from Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04359/) (2021)
- [PersonaLLM: Investigating the Ability of Large Language Models to Express Personality Traits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02547/) (2023)
- [Two Tales of Persona in LLMs: A Survey of Role-Playing and Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01171/) (2024)
- [On the steerability of large language models toward data-driven personas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04978/) (2023)
- [Dimensional Modeling of Emotions in Text with Appraisal Theories: Corpus Creation, Annotation Reliability, and Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05238/) (2022)
- [Sycophancy Is Not One Thing: Causal Separation of Sycophantic Behaviors in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21305/) (2025)
- [Appraisal Theories for Emotion Classification in Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14155/) (2020)
- [From Personas to Talks: Revisiting the Impact of Personas on LLM-Synthesized Emotional Support Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11451/) (2025)
- [LLMs Simulate Big Five Personality Traits: Further Evidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01765/) (2024)
- [Linear Personality Probing and Steering in LLMs: A Big Five Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.17639/) (2025)
- [Rhetorical Questions in LLM Representations: A Linear Probing Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.14128/) (2026)
- [Anatomy of a Feeling: Narrating Embodied Emotions via Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.19595/) (2025)
- [Do Emotions Influence Moral Judgment in Large Language Models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.19125/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Emotional labor is the effortful management of emotional displays to meet social or professional expectations. Personality traits have been correlated with emotional labor strategies, yet research on this link relies almost exclusively on self-report scales administered only in occupational settings. We investigate whether large language models injected with psychometrically grounded personas reproduce these personality-driven selection patterns across everyday social scenarios. We construct the first emotional labor strategy dataset of 500 socially situated events, each offering three behavioral choices corresponding to surface acting, deep acting, and genuine expression. We source 50 fictional characters from a large-scale personality repository and profile each through two parallel tracks: observer-rated bipolar adjective composites and in-character self-report items. Five LLMs evaluate all scenarios under both persona conditions. We find that models align more towards deep acting, and that Conscientiousness and Emotional Stability consistently predict this preference. Entropy analysis confirms that persona reliably influences the output and varies across models and emotions.