CAREBench: Evaluating LLMs' Emotion Understanding by Assessing Cognitive Appraisal Reasoning
Emotion understanding is a core capability for LLMs to interact effectively with humans, yet existing evaluation paradigms rely on discrete emotion label prediction and fail to capture the cognitive processes underlying emotion generation. Grounded in appraisal theory, we introduce CAREBench, the first benchmark with complete inferential chain annotations from both first- and third-person perspectives on real-world narratives, spanning appraisal reasoning, appraisal ratings, and multi-label emotion annotation. We propose a process-level evaluation framework and conduct systematic experiments across six LLMs organized around four research questions. We find that stronger models match or su...
| Authors | Zhaoyue Sun, Hainiu Xu, Andero Uusberg et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 16 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 16 May 2026 |
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