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
The increasing integration of LLMs into sensitive applications like mental health necessitates immediate and thorough testing of their cultural biases and accuracy.
This highlights critical limitations in LLM cross-cultural understanding, particularly in mental health, which could lead to misdiagnosis or ineffective support if not addressed.
The understanding that LLMs, while powerful, may require localized linguistic and cultural fine-tuning to perform reliably in diverse contexts, especially for nuanced applications.
- · AI researchers specializing in cultural alignment
- · Mental health professionals with cross-cultural expertise
- · Developers of multilingual LLMs
- · Companies deploying un-localised general-purpose LLMs in mental health
- · Monolingual LLM development approaches
Increased investment in culturally sensitive LLM development and validation processes.
Demand for benchmark datasets and testing methodologies that explicitly address cross-cultural nuances in AI systems.
The emergence of 'cultural AI auditors' or specialized regulatory bodies to ensure LLM safety and efficacy across different populations.
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Read at arXiv cs.CL