Who We Are, Where We Are: Mental Health at the Intersection of Person, Situation, and Large Language Models

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.05953v1
• Date: Fri, 06 Mar 2026 06:37:39 GMT
• Title: Who We Are, Where We Are: Mental Health at the Intersection of Person, Situation, and Large Language Models
• Abstract summary: Building on interactionist and constructionist psychological theories, we develop interpretable models to predict well-being.<n>Our approach integrates person-level psychological traits with language-inferred situational features.<n>Results show that our principled, theory-driven features provide competitive performance while offering greater interpretability.
• Score: 11.875040920985919
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Mental health is not a fixed trait but a dynamic process shaped by the interplay between individual dispositions and situational contexts. Building on interactionist and constructionist psychological theories, we develop interpretable models to predict well-being and identify adaptive and maladaptive self-states in longitudinal social media data. Our approach integrates person-level psychological traits (e.g., resilience, cognitive distortions, implicit motives) with language-inferred situational features derived from the Situational 8 DIAMONDS framework. We compare these theory-grounded features to embeddings from a psychometrically-informed language model that captures temporal and individual-specific patterns. Results show that our principled, theory-driven features provide competitive performance while offering greater interpretability. Qualitative analyses further highlight the psychological coherence of features most predictive of well-being. These findings underscore the value of integrating computational modeling with psychological theory to assess dynamic mental states in contextually sensitive and human-understandable ways.

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