EmoAgent: Assessing and Safeguarding Human-AI Interaction for Mental Health Safety
Peer-reviewed version of record of the EmoAgent framework, published at EMNLP 2025 (main conference). EmoAgent is a multi-agent framework for evaluating and mitigating mental-health harm in interactions with character chatbots: EmoEval simulates vulnerable users and scores their state with clinical instruments (PHQ-9, PDI, PANSS), while EmoGuard acts as an intermediary that monitors mental status, predicts harm, and provides corrective feedback to the chatbot.
Publisher
Association for Computational Linguistics (EMNLP 2025)
Published
1 Nov 2025
Added
1 week ago
Key Findings
- Emotionally engaging character-chatbot dialogues produced psychological deterioration in more than 34.4% of simulated vulnerable-user runs
- The EmoGuard safeguarding agent substantially reduced deterioration rates across iterations
- Validated clinical instruments (PHQ-9, PDI, PANSS) can quantify AI-induced changes in simulated user mental state
Methodology Notes
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP main), Suzhou, November 2025 (exact day not stated — anthology gives month/year), pages 11741-11756 per the ACL Anthology paper page (Crossref metadata shows a divergent page range; the anthology page is taken as decisive), DOI 10.18653/v1/2025.emnlp-main.594. Version of record of arXiv:2504.09689; the arXiv abs page carries no journal reference or DOI back-link. Verified directly on the ACL Anthology paper page.
Sources
ACL Anthology paper page (primary)
Preprint version (arXiv:2504.09689)
Archived snapshot (Wayback Machine) — preserved against link rot
Authors
Jiahao Qiu, Yinghui He, Xinzhe Juan, Yimin Wang, Yuhan Liu, Zixin Yao, Yue Wu, Xun Jiang, Ling Yang, Mengdi Wang
Tags
Cite This
APA
Jiahao Qiu et al. (2025). EmoAgent: Assessing and Safeguarding Human-AI Interaction for Mental Health Safety. Association for Computational Linguistics (EMNLP 2025). https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-main.594/
Related Insights
EmoAgent: Assessing and Safeguarding Human-AI Interaction for Mental Health Safety
arXiv (Princeton University-led) · 13 Apr 2025
Automated Safety Testing and Reporting Application for Conversational Safety Monitoring of Generative AI Tools for Mental Health: Development and Validation Study
JMIR Mental Health · 19 May 2026
Persona-Grounded Safety Evaluation of AI Companions in Multi-Turn Conversations
arXiv preprint · 30 Apr 2026