Personality recognition aims to identify the personality traits implied in user data such as dialogues and social media posts. Current research predominantly treats personality recognition as a classification task, failing to reveal the supporting evidence for the recognized personality. In this paper, we propose a novel task named Explainable Personality Recognition, aiming to reveal the reasoning process as supporting evidence of the personality trait. Inspired by personality theories, personality traits are made up of stable patterns of personality state, where the states are short-term characteristic patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in a concrete situation at a specific moment in time. We propose an explainable personality recognition framework called Chain-of-Personality-Evidence (CoPE), which involves a reasoning process from specific contexts to short-term personality states to long-term personality traits. Furthermore, based on the CoPE framework, we construct an explainable personality recognition dataset from dialogues, PersonalityEvd. We introduce two explainable personality state recognition and explainable personality trait recognition tasks, which require
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Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated promising capabilities to generate responses that simulate consistent personality traits. Despite the major attempts to analyze personality expression through output-based evaluations, little is known about how such traits are internally encoded within LLM parameters. In this paper, we introduce a layer-wise probing framework to systematically investigate the layer-wise capability of LLMs in simulating personality for responding. We conduct probing experiments on 11 open-source LLMs over the PersonalityEdit benchmark and find that LLMs predominantly simulate personality for responding in their middle and upper layers, with instruction-tuned models demonstrating a slightly clearer separation of personality traits. Furthermore, by interpreting the trained probing hyperplane as a layer-wise boundary for each personality category, we propose a layer-wise perturbation method to edit the personality expressed by LLMs during inference. Our results show that even when the prompt explicitly specifies a particular personality, our method can still successfully alter the response personality of LLMs. Interestingly, the difficulty of converting be
Driven by the demand for personalized AI systems, there is growing interest in aligning the behavior of large language models (LLMs) with human traits such as personality. Previous attempts to induce personality in LLMs have shown promising results, but they struggle to capture the continuous and multidimensional nature of human traits. In this work, we propose a novel method for personality modulation in LLMs via model merging. Specifically, we construct personality vectors by subtracting the weights of a pre-trained model from those of the fine-tuned model on a given personality trait. By merging personality vectors, we enable LLMs to exhibit desired personality traits without additional training. Extensive experiments show that personality vectors enable continuous control over trait intensity and support the composition of multiple traits. Furthermore, personality vectors transfer across diverse downstream models, suggesting that they encode generalizable representations of personality. Our code is available at here.
While significant work has been done on personality recognition, the lack of multilingual datasets remains an unresolved challenge. To address this, we propose ADAM (Cross-Lingual (A)ttention (D)istillation with Personality-Guided Generative (A)ugmentation for (M)ultilingual Personality Recognition), a state-of-the-art approach designed to advance multilingual personality recognition. Our approach leverages an existing English-language personality dataset as the primary source and employs a large language model (LLM) for translationbased augmentation, enhanced by Personality-Informed Generative Augmentation (PIGA), to generate high-quality training data in multiple languages, including Japanese, Chinese, Malay, and French. We provide a thorough analysis to justify the effectiveness of these augmentation techniques. Building on these advancements, ADAM integrates Cross-Lingual Attention Distillation (CLAD) to train a model capable of understanding and recognizing personality traits across languages, bridging linguistic and cultural gaps in personality analysis. This research presents a thorough evaluation of the proposed augmentation method, incorporating an ablation study on recogn
This work investigates how personality expression and embodiment affect personality perception and learning in educational conversational agents. We extend an existing personality-driven conversational agent framework by integrating LLM-based conversation support tailored to an educational application. We describe a user study built on this system to evaluate two distinct personality styles: high extroversion and agreeableness and low extroversion and agreeableness. For each personality style, we assess three models: (1) a dialogue-only model that conveys personality through dialogue, (2) an animated human model that expresses personality solely through dialogue, and (3) an animated human model that expresses personality through both dialogue and body and facial animations. The results indicate that all models are positively perceived regarding both personality and learning outcomes. Models with high personality traits are perceived as more engaging than those with low personality traits. We provide a comprehensive quantitative and qualitative analysis of perceived personality traits, learning parameters, and user experiences based on participant ratings of the model types and pers
The low-intrusion and automated personality assessment is receiving increasing attention in psychology and human-computer interaction fields. This study explores an interactive approach for personality assessment, focusing on the multiplicity of personality representation. We propose a framework of Gamified Personality Assessment through Multi-Personality Representations (Multi-PR GPA). The framework leverages Large Language Models to empower virtual agents with different personalities. These agents elicit multifaceted human personality representations through engaging in interactive games. Drawing upon the multi-type textual data generated throughout the interaction, it achieves personality assessments with interpretable insights. Grounded in the classic Big Five personality theory, we developed a prototype system and conducted a user study to evaluate the efficacy of Multi-PR GPA. The results affirm the effectiveness of our approach in personality assessment and demonstrate its superior performance when considering the multiplicity of personality representation. Error structure analysis further revealed systematic assessment biases in LLMs, which multi-context aggregation partial
Personality is a fundamental construct in psychology, reflecting an individual's behavior, thinking, and emotional patterns. Previous researches have made some progress in personality detection, primarily by utilizing the whole text to predict personality. However, these studies generally tend to overlook psychological knowledge: they rarely apply the well-established correlations between emotion regulation and personality. Based on this, we propose a new personality detection method called EERPD. This method introduces the use of emotion regulation, a psychological concept highly correlated with personality, for personality prediction. By combining this feature with emotion features, it retrieves few-shot examples and provides process CoTs for inferring labels from text. This approach enhances the understanding of LLM for personality within text and improves the performance in personality detection. Experimental results demonstrate that EERPD significantly enhances the accuracy and robustness of personality detection, outperforming previous SOTA by 15.05/4.29 in average F1 on the two benchmark datasets.
Personality psychologists have analyzed the relationship between personality and safety behaviors in human society. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate personality traits, the relationship between personality traits and safety abilities in LLMs still remains a mystery. In this paper, we discover that LLMs' personality traits are closely related to their safety abilities, i.e., toxicity, privacy, and fairness, based on the reliable MBTI-M scale. Meanwhile, the safety alignment generally increases various LLMs' Extraversion, Sensing, and Judging traits. According to such findings, we can edit LLMs' personality traits and improve their safety performance, e.g., inducing personality from ISTJ to ISTP resulted in a relative improvement of approximately 43% and 10% in privacy and fairness performance, respectively. Additionally, we find that LLMs with different personality traits are differentially susceptible to jailbreak. This study pioneers the investigation of LLM safety from a personality perspective, providing new insights into LLM safety enhancement.
Have Large Language Models (LLMs) developed a personality? The short answer is a resounding "We Don't Know!". In this paper, we show that we do not yet have the right tools to measure personality in language models. Personality is an important characteristic that influences behavior. As LLMs emulate human-like intelligence and performance in various tasks, a natural question to ask is whether these models have developed a personality. Previous works have evaluated machine personality through self-assessment personality tests, which are a set of multiple-choice questions created to evaluate personality in humans. A fundamental assumption here is that human personality tests can accurately measure personality in machines. In this paper, we investigate the emergence of personality in five LLMs of different sizes ranging from 1.5B to 30B. We propose the Option-Order Symmetry property as a necessary condition for the reliability of these self-assessment tests. Under this condition, the answer to self-assessment questions is invariant to the order in which the options are presented. We find that many LLMs personality test responses do not preserve option-order symmetry. We take a deeper
Personalized Large Language Models (LLMs) have been shown to be an effective way to create more engaging and enjoyable user-AI interactions. While previous studies have explored using prompts to elicit specific personality traits in LLMs, they have not optimized these prompts to maximize personality expression. To address this limitation, we propose PersonaPulse: Dynamic Profile Optimization for Realistic Personality Expression in LLMs, a framework that leverages LLMs' inherent knowledge of personality traits to iteratively enhance role-play prompts while integrating a situational response benchmark as a scoring tool, ensuring a more realistic and contextually grounded evaluation to guide the optimization process. Quantitative evaluations demonstrate that the prompts generated by PersonaPulse outperform those of prior work, which were designed based on personality descriptions from psychological studies. Additionally, we explore the relationship between model size and personality modeling through extensive experiments. Finally, we find that, for certain personality traits, the extent of personality evocation can be partially controlled by pausing the optimization process. These fin
We propose a mathematical framework for organizational psychology based on a Maximum Entropy model of a group's personalities. The Maximum Entropy model is then decimated to a single ``collective personality''. If the original personality scores are augmented by intelligence and emotional quotients, then a collective intelligence is also mathematically revealed. With simple matrix analyses of the collective personality, one can understand: that weak interpersonal coupling can strongly affect group character; that malleable rather than stubborn personalities control the group's collective personality; that one can mathematically solve for optimal top-down directives to achieve certain group personalities; and that groups can have a personality disorder even if the individuals composing the groups are neurotypical. We hope that this framework provides a useful starting point for future mathematical analyses in organizational psychology related to innate character rather than opinion dynamics or decision making, and note that the analysis can be applied to much more complex Maximum Entropy models than the one proposed here if empirical evidence suggests that the Gaussian model propose
Generating appropriate emotions for responses is essential for dialog systems to provide human-like interaction in various application scenarios. Most previous dialog systems tried to achieve this goal by learning empathetic manners from anonymous conversational data. However, emotional responses generated by those methods may be inconsistent, which will decrease user engagement and service quality. Psychological findings suggest that the emotional expressions of humans are rooted in personality traits. Therefore, we propose a new task, Personality-affected Emotion Generation, to generate emotion based on the personality given to the dialog system and further investigate a solution through the personality-affected mood transition. Specifically, we first construct a daily dialog dataset, Personality EmotionLines Dataset (PELD), with emotion and personality annotations. Subsequently, we analyze the challenges in this task, i.e., (1) heterogeneously integrating personality and emotional factors and (2) extracting multi-granularity emotional information in the dialog context. Finally, we propose to model the personality as the transition weight by simulating the mood transition process
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated the ability to simulate human-like OCEAN personality traits in generated text. Previous efforts have focused on prompt engineering or fine-tuning to shape LLM personality. In this work, we propose a mechanistic interpretability approach that directly intervenes on the model's latent features. Our method identifies latent directions in the residual stream corresponding to a target OCEAN trait using sparse autoencoders (SAEs) and contrastive activation analysis. We formalize an additive steering vector in activation space and demonstrate how applying a small additive shift to the hidden states enhances the target trait while preserving overall language modeling performance. To determine the optimal combination of feature shifts, we explore a linear weighting heuristic with grid search optimization that balances personality expression with task performance. Our approach shows promise in controllably steering personality traits at the mechanistic level while maintaining high performance on standard benchmarks.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated human-like capabilities in language comprehension and generation, becoming active participants in social and cognitive domains. This study investigates whether LLMs exhibit personality-like traits and how these traits compare with human personality, focusing on the applicability of conventional personality assessment tools. A behavior-based approach was used across three empirical studies. Study 1 examined test-retest stability and found that LLMs show higher variability and are more input-sensitive than humans, lacking long-term stability. Based on this, we propose the Distributed Personality Framework, conceptualizing LLM traits as dynamic and input-driven. Study 2 analyzed cross-variant consistency in personality measures and found LLMs' responses were highly sensitive to item wording, showing low internal consistency compared to humans. Study 3 explored personality retention during role-playing, showing LLM traits are shaped by prompt and parameter settings. These findings suggest that LLMs express fluid, externally dependent personality patterns, offering insights for constructing LLM-specific personality frameworks and advancing
Aligning large language models (LLMs) typically aim to reflect general human values and behaviors, but they often fail to capture the unique characteristics and preferences of individual users. To address this gap, we introduce the concept of Personality Alignment. This approach tailors LLMs' responses and decisions to match the specific preferences of individual users or closely related groups. Inspired by psychometrics, we created the Personality Alignment with Personality Inventories (PAPI) dataset, which includes data from over 320,000 real subjects across multiple personality assessments, including both the Big Five Personality Factors and Dark Triad traits. This comprehensive dataset enables quantitative evaluation of LLMs' alignment capabilities across both positive and potentially problematic personality dimensions. Recognizing the challenges of personality alignments, such as limited personal data, diverse preferences, and scalability requirements, we developed an activation intervention optimization method. This method enhances LLMs' ability to efficiently align with individual behavioral preferences using minimal data and computational resources. Remarkably, our method,
This study explores the relationship between personality diversity and national economic performance, introducing the Global Personality Diversity Index ($Ψ$-GPDI) as a novel metric. Leveraging a dataset of 760,242 individuals across 135 countries, we quantify within-country diversity based on the Big Five personality traits. Our findings reveal that personality diversity accounts for 19.9% of the variance in GDP per capita and provides an additional 2.8% explanatory power beyond institutional quality and immigration, underscoring its unique contribution to economic vitality. Through multi-factor analysis, we demonstrate how personality diversity complements existing economic frameworks, offering actionable insights for policymakers seeking to enhance innovation, productivity, and resilience. This research positions psychological diversity as a critical yet under explored factor in driving economic growth, bridging the fields of psychology and economics.
The fundamental role of personality in shaping interactions is increasingly being exploited in robotics. A carefully designed robotic personality has been shown to improve several key aspects of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). However, the fragmentation and rigidity of existing approaches reveal even greater challenges when applied to non-humanoid robots. On one hand, the state of the art is very dispersed; on the other hand, Industry 4.0 is moving towards a future where humans and industrial robots are going to coexist. In this context, the proper design of a robotic personality can lead to more successful interactions. This research takes a first step in that direction by integrating a comprehensive cognitive architecture built upon the definition of robotic personality - validated on humanoid robots - into a robotic Kinova Jaco2 arm. The robot personality is defined through the cognitive architecture as a vector in the three-dimensional space encompassing Conscientiousness, Extroversion, and Agreeableness, affecting how actions are executed, the action selection process, and the internal reaction to environmental stimuli. Our main objective is to determine whether users perceive
Psychology research has long explored aspects of human personality such as extroversion, agreeableness and emotional stability. Categorizations like the `Big Five' personality traits are commonly used to assess and diagnose personality types. In this work, we explore the question of whether the perceived personality in language models is exhibited consistently in their language generation. For example, is a language model such as GPT2 likely to respond in a consistent way if asked to go out to a party? We also investigate whether such personality traits can be controlled. We show that when provided different types of contexts (such as personality descriptions, or answers to diagnostic questions about personality traits), language models such as BERT and GPT2 can consistently identify and reflect personality markers in those contexts. This behavior illustrates an ability to be manipulated in a highly predictable way, and frames them as tools for identifying personality traits and controlling personas in applications such as dialog systems. We also contribute a crowd-sourced data-set of personality descriptions of human subjects paired with their `Big Five' personality assessment dat
Personality-aware recommendation systems have been proven to achieve high accuracy compared to conventional recommendation systems. In addition to that, personality-aware recommendation systems could help alleviate cold start and data sparsity problems. Most of the existing works use Big-Five personality model to represent the user's personality, this is due to the popularity of Big-Five model in the literature of psychology. However, from personality computing perspective, the choice of the most suitable personality model that satisfy the requirements of the recommendation application and the recommended content type still needs further investigation. In this paper, we study and compare four personality-aware recommendation systems based on different personality models, namely Big-Five, Eysenck and HEXACO from the personality traits theory, and Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MPTI) from the personality types theory. Following that, we propose a hybrid personality model for recommendation that takes advantage of the personality traits models, as well as the personality types models. Through extensive experiments on recommendation dataset, we prove the efficiency of the proposed model,