Somatic in the East, Psychological in the West?: Investigating Clinically-Grounded Cross-Cultural Depression Symptom Expression in LLMs

arXiv:2508.03247v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Prior clinical psychology research shows that Western individuals with depression tend to report psychological symptoms, while Eastern individuals report somatic ones. We test whether Large Language Models (LLMs), which are increasingly used in mental health, reproduce these cultural patterns by prompting them with Western or Eastern personas. Results show that LLMs largely fail to replicate the patterns when prompted in English, though prompting in major Eastern languages (i.e., Chinese, Japanese, and Hindi) improves alignment in several con

Source: arXiv cs.CL — read the full report at the original publisher.

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