Who We Are, Where We Are: Mental Health at the Intersection of Person, Situation, and Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Soni, Nikita, Nilsson, August Håkan, Mahwish, Syeda, Varadarajan, Vasudha, Schwartz, H. Andrew, Boyd, Ryan L.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Soni, Nikita
Nilsson, August Håkan
Mahwish, Syeda
Varadarajan, Vasudha
Schwartz, H. Andrew
Boyd, Ryan L.
author_facet Soni, Nikita
Nilsson, August Håkan
Mahwish, Syeda
Varadarajan, Vasudha
Schwartz, H. Andrew
Boyd, Ryan L.
contents Mental health is not a fixed trait but a dynamic process shaped by the interplay between individual dispositions and situational contexts. Building on interactionist and constructionist psychological theories, we develop interpretable models to predict well-being and identify adaptive and maladaptive self-states in longitudinal social media data. Our approach integrates person-level psychological traits (e.g., resilience, cognitive distortions, implicit motives) with language-inferred situational features derived from the Situational 8 DIAMONDS framework. We compare these theory-grounded features to embeddings from a psychometrically-informed language model that captures temporal and individual-specific patterns. Results show that our principled, theory-driven features provide competitive performance while offering greater interpretability. Qualitative analyses further highlight the psychological coherence of features most predictive of well-being. These findings underscore the value of integrating computational modeling with psychological theory to assess dynamic mental states in contextually sensitive and human-understandable ways.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_05953
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Who We Are, Where We Are: Mental Health at the Intersection of Person, Situation, and Large Language Models
Soni, Nikita
Nilsson, August Håkan
Mahwish, Syeda
Varadarajan, Vasudha
Schwartz, H. Andrew
Boyd, Ryan L.
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Human-Computer Interaction
Machine Learning
Mental health is not a fixed trait but a dynamic process shaped by the interplay between individual dispositions and situational contexts. Building on interactionist and constructionist psychological theories, we develop interpretable models to predict well-being and identify adaptive and maladaptive self-states in longitudinal social media data. Our approach integrates person-level psychological traits (e.g., resilience, cognitive distortions, implicit motives) with language-inferred situational features derived from the Situational 8 DIAMONDS framework. We compare these theory-grounded features to embeddings from a psychometrically-informed language model that captures temporal and individual-specific patterns. Results show that our principled, theory-driven features provide competitive performance while offering greater interpretability. Qualitative analyses further highlight the psychological coherence of features most predictive of well-being. These findings underscore the value of integrating computational modeling with psychological theory to assess dynamic mental states in contextually sensitive and human-understandable ways.
title Who We Are, Where We Are: Mental Health at the Intersection of Person, Situation, and Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Human-Computer Interaction
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.05953