PsychAdapter: adapting LLMs to reflect traits, personality, and mental health

Abstract AI language generators are now ubiquitous but typically produce generic text that fails to reflect individual differences. Here, we introduce PsychAdapter, a lightweight LLM architectural modification that uses empirically derived links between language and personality, demographic, and mental health traits to generate trait-reflective text, regardless of prompt. PsychAdapter was applied to GPT-2, Gemma-2B, and LLaMA-3, and expert raters confirmed that the generated text matched the specified traits: it produced Big Five personality traits with 87.3% and depression and life satisfaction with 96.7% accuracy. PsychAdapter is a novel method for embedding psychological behavioral patterns into language models by conditioning every transformer layer, without relying on prompting. Beyond personality-conditioned generation, this approach has potential uses for simulated patients reflecting psychopathology and translation tailored to reading or educational level. It also enables generation of characteristic sentences for studying the language of traits, expanding the language processing toolkit for psychology.