语言模型在群体模拟中自发产生情绪传染,无需直接传递情绪
How Affect Propagates among LLM Agents: Emergent Emotional Contagion in Crowd Simulation

- 通过感知-评估-表达循环实现代理间情绪传播,无预设情绪传递机制
- 在五种场景中观察到情绪随空间和时间扩散,警报触发后平均受感染比例稳定在非零水平
- 情绪反应受性格特质影响,适合研究社会行为建模与多智能体系统设计
本文研究语言模型在多智能体人群模拟中的行为,聚焦情绪如何在相互感知与评估的代理间传播。每个代理通过视觉、听觉和触觉通道感知邻近代理,再结合提示的性格特征、记忆、当前情绪状态和情境背景进行评估。评估由大语言模型完成,更新代理内部情绪状态并决定外在表现。系统未包含人工设计的情绪状态传递机制,而是通过感知-评估-表达循环自然产生跨代理影响。代理表征基于大五人格模型和罗斯曼情绪环形模型。为降低延迟,低层级的导航由独立的传统人群模拟器处理。在涵盖警报、喜悦和中性情境的五个不同空间布局的场景中评估该架构。结果表明,系统在稀疏小规模人群中表现出具有时空结构和性格依赖性的心理传染动态:警报以传播波形式扩散,平均受警报影响比例趋于非零平台;不同性格提示分布决定模糊警报是否引发恐慌,或挑衅被解读为愤怒或恐惧。通过控制实验评估评估步骤,对比不同提示变体、采样温度及四种模型后端,发现动态表现具有后端依赖性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
This paper studies the behavior of language models in a multi-agent crowd simulation, focusing on how affect propagates among agents that perceive and appraise one another. Each agent perceives its neighbors through visual, auditory, and tactile channels, then appraises these perceptions in light of its prompted personality profile, memory, current affective state, and situational context. Appraisal is carried out by an LLM, which updates the agent's internal affective state and selects its outward expression. The architecture contains no hand-authored mechanism for directly transferring affective state between agents; instead, inter-agent influence arises through the perception-appraisal-expression loop. The agent representation draws on the Big Five personality model and Russell's circumplex model of affect. To limit latency, low-level steering and navigation are handled by a conventional crowd simulator operating independently of the LLM-based cognitive layer. We evaluate the architecture across five scenario environments spanning alarming, joyful, and neutral situations in different spatial layouts. The results show that the system produces emotional contagion dynamics with spatial, temporal, and personality-dependent structure in sparse, small crowds. Alarm spreads from seeded agents as a traveling front, the mean alarmed fraction settles at a nonzero plateau, and the distribution of prompted personality profiles determines whether an ambiguous alarm ignites panic and whether a provocation is interpreted as anger or fear. We further evaluate the appraisal step through controlled experiments across prompt variants, sampling temperatures, and four model backends, showing that the dynamics are backend-dependent.
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