Identifying Effective Strategies in Prompt Evolution for Stress and Emotion Prediction

Early stress detection and risk prediction are crucial for timely mental health assessment and support. While large language models have recently shown promise for social media stress prediction, relying on accuracy can obscure false positives. Also, prompt revisions yield inconsistent gains across models and tasks, with unclear links to strategy combinations and instruction changes. By comparing six methods on social media stress and emotion data across two model sizes, we found that GEPA and its extension combining instructions from two prompts (GEPA+merge) improved prediction over initial prompts in several settings. We also identified five prompting strategies associated with development gains. These strategies included directing attention to emotional evidence, distinguishing current from past distress, illustrating indirect cues, requiring emotional context, and guiding label selection. Moreover, we documented four observations across tasks and evaluation settings. In a separate set of searches, binary stress prediction improved early, whereas multilabel emotion prediction initially declined and partly recovered. The other three concerned incorrect or conflicting instructions, gains on small comparison samples that did not hold on full development data, and changes in selected prompts' development and reported test rankings. These findings identify effective prompt evolution methods, strategy combinations associated with gains, and task and evaluation limits, providing guidance for applying prompt evolution methods to social media stress detection.