Psych\=eChat: An Empathic Framework Focused on Emotion Shift Tracking and Safety Risk Analysis in Psychological Counseling

TL;DR

Psych=eChat is a novel framework that enhances psychological counseling with explicit emotion shift tracking and safety risk analysis, improving emotional understanding and safety in LLM-based counseling.

Contribution

It introduces a dual-module system for emotion management and risk control, along with two modeling paradigms for effective emotion and safety-aware counseling.

Findings

Outperforms existing methods in emotional insight

Demonstrates improved safety risk mitigation

Effective in dialogue-level evaluations and human assessments

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated notable advancements in psychological counseling. However, existing models generally do not explicitly model seekers' emotion shifts across counseling sessions, a core focus in classical psychological schools. Moreover, how to align counselor models' responses with these emotion shifts while proactively mitigating safety risks remains underexplored. To bridge these gaps, we propose Psych\=eChat, which explicitly integrates emotion shift tracking and safety risk analysis for psychological counseling. Specifically, we employ interactive role-playing to synthesize counselor--seeker dialogues, incorporating two modules: Emotion Management Module, to capture seekers' current emotions and emotion shifts; and Risk Control Module, to anticipate seekers' subsequent reactions and identify potential risks. Furthermore, we introduce two modeling paradigms. The Agent Mode structures emotion management, risk control, and counselor responses into a collaborative multi-agent pipeline. The LLM Mode integrates these stages into a unified chain-of-thought for end-to-end inference, balancing efficiency and performance. Extensive experiments, including interactive scoring, dialogue-level evaluation, and human assessment, demonstrate that Psych\=eChat outperforms existing methods for emotional insight and safety control.