FreakOut-LLM: The Effect of Emotional Stimuli on Safety Alignment
Safety-aligned LLMs go through refusal training to reject harmful requests, but whether these mechanisms remain effective under emotionally charged stimuli is unexplored. We introduce FreakOut-LLM, a framework investigating whether emotional context compromises safety alignment in adversarial settings. Using validated psychological stimuli, we evaluate how emotional priming through system prompts affects jailbreak susceptibility across ten LLMs. We test three conditions (stress, relaxation, neutral) using scenarios from established psychological protocols, plus a no-prompt baseline, and evaluate attack success using HarmBench on AdvBench prompts. Stress priming increases jailbreak success...
| Authors | Daniel Kuznetsov, Ofir Cohen, Karin Shistik et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 5 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 5 April 2026 |
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