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arXiv · 2603.05953

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

Nikita Soni·August Håkan Nilsson·Syeda Mahwish·Vasudha Varadarajan·H. Andrew Schwartz·Ryan L. Boyd
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Abstract

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.

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Nikita Soni, August Håkan Nilsson, Syeda Mahwish, Vasudha Varadarajan, H. Andrew Schwartz, Ryan L. Boyd. 2026-03-06. Who We Are, Where We Are: Mental Health at the Intersection of Person, Situation, and Large Language Models. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1%2F2025.clpsych-1.27

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