Psychologically-Grounded Graph Modeling for Interpretable Depression Detection

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Vyalla, Rishitej Reddy, Prasad, Kritarth, Anand, Avinash, Cambria, Erik, Ji, Shaoxiong, Alamri, Faten S., Wang, Zhengkui
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Vyalla, Rishitej Reddy
Prasad, Kritarth
Anand, Avinash
Cambria, Erik
Ji, Shaoxiong
Alamri, Faten S.
Wang, Zhengkui
author_facet Vyalla, Rishitej Reddy
Prasad, Kritarth
Anand, Avinash
Cambria, Erik
Ji, Shaoxiong
Alamri, Faten S.
Wang, Zhengkui
contents Automatic depression detection from conversational interactions holds significant promise for scalable screening but remains hindered by severe data scarcity and a lack of clinical interpretability. Existing approaches typically rely on black-box deep learning architectures that struggle to model the subtle, temporal evolution of depressive symptoms or account for participant-specific heterogeneity. In this work, we propose PsyGAT (Psychological Graph Attention Network), a psychologically grounded framework that models conversational sessions as dynamic temporal graphs. We introduce Psychological Expression Units (PEUs) to explicitly encode utterance-level clinical evidence, structuring the session graph to capture transitions in psychological states rather than mere semantic dependencies. To address the critical class imbalance in depression datasets, we employ clinically approved persona-based data augmentation, enable robust model learning. Additionally, we integrate session-level personality context directly into the graph structure to disentangle trait-based behavior from acute depressive symptoms. PsyGAT achieves state-of-the-art performance, surpassing both strong graph-based baselines and closed-source LLMs like GPT-5, achieving 89.99 and 71.37 Macro F1 scores in DAIC-WoZ and E-DAIC, respectively. We further introduce Causal-PsyGAT, an interpretability module that identifies symptom triggers. Experiments show a 20% improvement in MRR for identifying causal indicators, effectively bridging the gap between depression monitoring and clinical explainability. The full augmented dataset is publicly available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.31801921.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_24126
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Psychologically-Grounded Graph Modeling for Interpretable Depression Detection
Vyalla, Rishitej Reddy
Prasad, Kritarth
Anand, Avinash
Cambria, Erik
Ji, Shaoxiong
Alamri, Faten S.
Wang, Zhengkui
Computation and Language
Automatic depression detection from conversational interactions holds significant promise for scalable screening but remains hindered by severe data scarcity and a lack of clinical interpretability. Existing approaches typically rely on black-box deep learning architectures that struggle to model the subtle, temporal evolution of depressive symptoms or account for participant-specific heterogeneity. In this work, we propose PsyGAT (Psychological Graph Attention Network), a psychologically grounded framework that models conversational sessions as dynamic temporal graphs. We introduce Psychological Expression Units (PEUs) to explicitly encode utterance-level clinical evidence, structuring the session graph to capture transitions in psychological states rather than mere semantic dependencies. To address the critical class imbalance in depression datasets, we employ clinically approved persona-based data augmentation, enable robust model learning. Additionally, we integrate session-level personality context directly into the graph structure to disentangle trait-based behavior from acute depressive symptoms. PsyGAT achieves state-of-the-art performance, surpassing both strong graph-based baselines and closed-source LLMs like GPT-5, achieving 89.99 and 71.37 Macro F1 scores in DAIC-WoZ and E-DAIC, respectively. We further introduce Causal-PsyGAT, an interpretability module that identifies symptom triggers. Experiments show a 20% improvement in MRR for identifying causal indicators, effectively bridging the gap between depression monitoring and clinical explainability. The full augmented dataset is publicly available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.31801921.
title Psychologically-Grounded Graph Modeling for Interpretable Depression Detection
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.24126