Somatic in the East, Psychological in the West?: Investigating Clinically-Grounded Cross-Cultural Depression Symptom Expression in LLMs
Shintaro Sakai; Jisun An; Migyeong Kang; Haewoon Kwak · 2025 · arXiv
WASTE classifies this as Negative / Null Result Report · AI classification, approximate
The study found no significant effect — useful as a negative control or null benchmark for your own design.
Abstract (excerpt)
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 configurations. Our analysis pinpoints two key reasons
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Metadata source: arXiv