Beyond Feeling Better: Capability-Sustaining Emotional Dialogue as a Longitudinal Research Paradigm

arXiv:2607.27851 · cs.CL, cs.HC, cs.SI · Submitted 2026-07-30 · Read on arXiv

Ming Wang, Jiaqi Wu Young, Wenfang Wu, Daling Wang, Shi Feng

cs.CL, cs.HC, cs.SI

Submitted: 2026-07-30

License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/

Terminology

• Papers — 25× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Benchmark — 17× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Capability-Sustaining Emotional Dialogue — 7× in this paper
• Sycophancy — 5× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Calibration — 3× in this paper · explained in 9 episodes
• Longitudinal Data — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Consistency — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Fidelity — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Grounding — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Scaffold — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Steering — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Adam — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Axioms — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Coherence — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Reinforcement Learning — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Scaffolding — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes

Sources

• Illusions of Intimacy: How Emotional Dynamics Shape Human-AI Relationships
• Auditing Stealth Sycophancy in Mental-Health Dialogue: Structured Clinical-State Diagnostics and Clean Matched Benchmarks
• HEART: A Unified Benchmark for Assessing Humans and LLMs in Emotional Support Dialogue
• Neural steering vectors reveal dose and exposure-dependent impacts of human-AI relationships
• "Death" of a Chatbot: Investigating and Designing Toward Psychologically Safe Endings for Human-AI Relationships
• Who's in Charge? Disempowerment Patterns in Real-World LLM Usage
• When Seekers Are Hard to Help: Evaluating Emotional Support Dialogue Systems in Worst-Case Interactions
• The Rise of AI Companions: Interaction with AI Companions and Psychological Well-being
• Modeling Multiple Support Strategies within a Single Turn for Emotional Support Conversations

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