From Chatbots to Confidants: A Cross-Cultural Study of LLM Adoption for Emotional Support

TL;DR

This large-scale cross-cultural study investigates how users across seven countries adopt and perceive LLMs for emotional support, revealing significant cultural and demographic influences on trust and usage.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive cross-cultural analysis of LLM use for emotional support, highlighting sociocultural factors affecting adoption and perception.

Findings

Adoption rates vary from 20% to 59% across countries.

Socioeconomic status is the strongest predictor of positive perceptions.

Users mainly seek help for loneliness, stress, and mental health issues.

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used not only for instrumental tasks, but as always-available and non-judgmental confidants for emotional support. Yet what drives adoption and how users perceive emotional support interactions across countries remains unknown. To address this gap, we present the first large-scale cross-cultural study of LLM use for emotional support, surveying 4,641 participants across seven countries (USA, UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, and The Netherlands). Our results show that adoption rates vary dramatically across countries (from 20% to 59%). Using mixed models that separate cultural effects from demographic composition, we find that: Being aged 25-44, religious, married, and of higher socioeconomic status are predictors of positive perceptions (trust, usage, perceived benefits), with socioeconomic status being the strongest. English-speaking countries consistently show more positive perceptions than Continental European countries. We further collect a corpus of 731 real multilingual prompts from user interactions, showing that users mainly seek help for loneliness, stress, relationship conflicts, and mental health struggles. Our findings reveal that LLM emotional support use is shaped by a complex sociotechnical landscape and call for a broader research agenda examining how these systems can be developed, deployed, and governed to ensure safe and informed access.