Are LLMs effective psychological assessors? Leveraging adaptive RAG for interpretable mental health screening through psychometric practice
In psychological practice, standardized questionnaires serve as essential tools for assessing mental constructs (e.g., attitudes, traits, and emotions) through structured questions (aka items). With the increasing prevalence of social media platforms where users share personal experiences and emotions, researchers are exploring computational methods to leverage this data for rapid mental health screening. In this study, we propose a novel adaptive Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) approach that completes psychological questionnaires by analyzing social media posts. Our method retrieves the most relevant user posts for each question in a psychological survey and uses Large Language Models (LLMs) to predict questionnaire scores in a zero-shot setting. Our findings are twofold. First we demonstrate that this approach can effectively predict users' responses to psychological questionnaires, such as the Beck Depression Inventory II (BDI-II), achieving performance comparable to or surpassing state-of-the-art models on Reddit-based benchmark datasets without relying on training data. Second, we show how this methodology can be generalized as a scalable screening tool, as the final assessment is systematically derived by completing standardized questionnaires and tracking how individual item responses contribute to the diagnosis, aligning with established psychometric practices.
Code (1)
Tasks
RAGRetrieval-augmented GenerationSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
LLMs as Assessors: Right for the Right Reason?
A good deal of recent research has focused on how Large Language Models (LLMs) may be used as judges in place of humans to evaluate the quality of the output produced by various text / image processing systems. Within th…
Information RetrievalDepreSym: A Depression Symptom Annotated Corpus and the Role of LLMs as Assessors of Psychological Markers
Computational methods for depression detection aim to mine traces of depression from online publications posted by Internet users. However, solutions trained on existing collections exhibit limited generalisation and int…
Depression DetectionPredictaBoard: Benchmarking LLM Score Predictability
Despite possessing impressive skills, Large Language Models (LLMs) often fail unpredictably, demonstrating inconsistent success in even basic common sense reasoning tasks. This unpredictability poses a significant challe…
BenchmarkingCommon Sense ReasoningJudgeBlender: Ensembling Judgments for Automatic Relevance Assessment
The effective training and evaluation of retrieval systems require a substantial amount of relevance judgments, which are traditionally collected from human assessors -- a process that is both costly and time-consuming. …
Leveraging Implicit Sentiments: Enhancing Reliability and Validity in Psychological Trait Evaluation of LLMs
Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to their increasing integration into human life. With the transition from mere tools to human-like assistants, understanding their psychological aspects-such a…