On Emotion-Sensitive Decision Making of Small Language Model Agents

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 8 Apr 2026] On Emotion-Sensitive Decision Making of Small Language Model Agents Jiaju Lin, Xingjian Du, Qingyun Wu, Ellen Wenting Zou, Jindong Wang Small language models (SLM) are increasingly used as interactive decision-making agents, yet most decision-oriented evaluations ignore emotion as a causal factor influencing behavior. We study emotion-sensitive decision making by combining representation-level emotion induction with a structured game-theoretic evaluation. Emotional states are induced using activation steering derived from crowd-validated, real-world emotion-eliciting texts, enabling controlled and transferable interventions beyond prompt-based methods. We introduce a benchmark built around canonical decision templates that span cooperative and competitive incentives under both complete and incomplete information. These templates are instantiated using strategic scenarios from \textsc{Diplomacy}, \textsc{StarCraft II}, and diverse real-world personas. Experiments across multiple model families in various architecture and modalities, show that emotional perturbations systematically affect strategic choices, but the resulting behaviors are often unstable and not fully aligned with human expectations. Finally, we outline an approach to improve robustness to emotion-driven perturbations. Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) Cite as: arXiv:2604.06562 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2604.06562v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.06562 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Jiaju Lin [view email] [v1] Wed, 8 Apr 2026 01:24:13 UTC (1,798 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)