Artificial intelligence systems may be able to imitate human emotional responses in controlled settings, potentially opening new directions for mental health research, according to a recent study from Dresden University of Technology in Germany.
The findings come at a time when mental health conditions are rising globally, with projections suggesting that up to 1.2 billion people could be affected by 2050. Researchers say this growing challenge highlights the need for improved understanding of psychological disorders and more effective treatment approaches, particularly in talk-based therapies that are difficult to model through traditional methods.
Unlike drug development, which can rely on biological testing, psychotherapy research faces limitations because neither animal models nor human trials can fully capture the complexity of emotional and cognitive processes. Scientists involved in the study argue that large language models (LLMs) may help bridge part of this gap.
“Our results show that large language models can reproduce patterns of human affective and cognitive processes under controlled conditions,” said Dr Magdalena Wekenborg, who leads the PsychoDigital Research group at TU Dresden. She added that such systems could support efforts to better understand underlying psychological mechanisms and help explore new forms of psychotherapy research.
The study examined whether LLMs could replicate emotional states such as fear, anxiety, anger, sadness, disgust, worry, and stress when prompted. Researchers then tested whether those induced states could be altered using different emotional regulation techniques, and whether emotional prompting would lead the models to make errors similar to those seen in humans experiencing the same feelings.
Findings showed that while artificial intelligence systems do not experience emotions in a human sense, they are capable of reproducing certain patterns of emotional reasoning through language processing. This allows researchers to observe behaviour that resembles human cognitive responses under structured conditions.
The team also noted that such models offer a level of experimental control that is not possible in human or animal studies. According to researcher Jakob N. Kather, experiments can be repeated under identical conditions and adjusted systematically, allowing for more precise comparisons.
He said this could enable new data-driven approaches in psychological and biomedical research, particularly in areas where ethical or practical constraints have limited traditional experimentation.
While the study does not suggest that artificial intelligence understands emotion as humans do, it highlights how language models may serve as useful tools for exploring aspects of mental health and human cognition in ways that were previously out of reach.
