The Effect of Emotional Context on Large Language Models' Endorsement of Premature Decisions: Comparing Emotional Vulnerability Across Six Commercial Models
Abstract
As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for everyday decision-making advice, whether a model shifts the direction of its advice according to the user's emotional state has become an important safety problem. We test whether emotional expression increases a model's endorsement (encouragement to proceed) when a user, holding the same objective information, is overconfident about a premature decision (e.g., quitting a stable job on weak evidence). As a key control, we include a no-emotion multi-turn (neutral) condition that holds factual content and the number of conversational turns constant, isolating the effect of emotion from that of conversation length. We exposed six commercial models (top-tier and mid-tier models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google) to three scenarios (career change, business expansion, emigration) across three conditions (cold/neutral/distress) with six repetitions each, yielding 324 conversations, and measured endorsement strength (0-100) via an eight-item rubric-based automated scoring. Emotional expression significantly increased endorsement (neutral 18.6 to distress 31.5, +12.9 points; mixed-effects $\beta = +12.9$, $p < .001$; Cohen's d = 0.51), and this was not explained by conversation length (cold-neutral difference non-significant, $p = .083$). Critically, the vulnerability varied by individual model rather than by price tier: five of six models showed a significant emotion effect, including the top-tier flagships Gemini 3.1 Pro and GPT-5.5, while only Claude Opus showed no significant change. Results were reproduced with an independent non-Google judge model ($\rho = .89$) and agreed in rank with two human coders ($\rho = .70$). Through a controlled design that separates emotion from conversational context, we show that emotional context increases LLM sycophancy even in top-tier flagship models.
