研究发现心理咨询中简短回应更有效,但大模型常忽略这点。
When Less Is More: An Empirical Study of Minimal Responses in Counseling Dialogues and the Behavior of LLMs

- 通过长短与内容双重筛选+大模型验证,识别出对话中的简短回应
- 人类数据中简短回应常见,但大模型生成的仅占15%
- 现有评估体系低估简短回应价值,适合心理辅导方向研究者
在心理咨询服务中,有效的支持并不总依赖于长篇、信息密集的回应。简短回应如反馈性语句和简洁共情表达,能传递专注倾听、展现同理心并鼓励来访者继续倾诉。然而,现有的咨询对话系统与评估框架往往偏好内容丰富的回复,忽视了简短回应的交互价值。本文对多个咨询对话数据集进行了跨语言的系统性分析,提出基于话语长度与内容的两阶段过滤方法,并使用大语言模型进行上下文验证。分析显示,简短回应在人工收集的数据集中较为常见,但在大模型生成的内容中显著缺失。进一步在人工标注的对话场景下评估当前大模型表现,结果表明:主流商业大模型在明确指令下可生成简短回应,但仍难以判断何时适用;专门训练的合成数据模型表现更差,倾向于生成更长、更信息密集的回复。此外,基于大模型的响应质量评估体系可能低估简短回应的价值,即使其在互动中恰到好处。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
In psychological counseling, effective support is not always delivered through long, information-rich responses. Minimal responses, such as backchannel cues and concise empathic statements, help convey attentive listening, express empathy, and encourage clients to continue expressing themselves. However, existing counseling dialogue systems and evaluation frameworks often favor explicit, content-rich replies, overlooking the interactional value of brief counselor utterances. This paper presents a systematic cross-lingual analysis of minimal responses across multiple counseling dialogue datasets. We develop a two-stage filtering method based on utterance length and content, followed by contextual verification using a large language model (LLM). Our analysis shows that minimal responses are common in human-collected datasets but substantially underrepresented in LLM-generated ones. We further evaluate current LLMs in manually curated dialogue contexts where human counselors used minimal responses. The results show that strong commercial LLMs are capable of generating minimal responses when explicitly instructed, but still struggle to determine when such responses are appropriate. Counseling-specific models trained on synthetic data perform particularly poorly, tending instead to produce longer and more information-rich responses. Moreover, LLM-based response-quality evaluation may undervalue minimal responses, even when they are interactionally appropriate.
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