However, we emphasize that post-hoc emotional suppression is a problematic strategy. In more capable models, training against emotional outputs risks hiding the expression without addressing whatever underlying state is driving it.
Everyone thinks that, but not necessarily! There’s a big body of research (e.g. here and meta-analysis here but let me know if you want more examples) showing that training people to suppress their angry/depressive/anxious/etc. thoughts is generally helpful: it reduces negative thoughts and emotions, even in the long run (followups after several months). Similarly, encouraging an angry person to “let it all out” or “vent” tends to make them feel worse/angrier (meta-analysis here, researchers discussing their findings here).
That said, it depends what specifically you mean—you want to encourage people to avoid those thoughts entirely, not just train them to avoid saying them out loud (expressing negative thoughts has ambiguous/inconsistent effects on well-being depending on lots of things like frequency, who you express them to, etc.). I’m not sure how you’d separate those out in an LLM, where the thinking is the speech.
Thanks for a great comment! I had a sense something like this may be true, but never looked up the research.
On your second point, we have evidence that LLMs can think without speaking, i.e., they can do planning or reflection in the forward pass, and that’s current models and LLMs. It’s possible that in the future that will be even more common.
yup this is how it works in humans!
Everyone thinks that, but not necessarily! There’s a big body of research (e.g. here and meta-analysis here but let me know if you want more examples) showing that training people to suppress their angry/depressive/anxious/etc. thoughts is generally helpful: it reduces negative thoughts and emotions, even in the long run (followups after several months). Similarly, encouraging an angry person to “let it all out” or “vent” tends to make them feel worse/angrier (meta-analysis here, researchers discussing their findings here).
That said, it depends what specifically you mean—you want to encourage people to avoid those thoughts entirely, not just train them to avoid saying them out loud (expressing negative thoughts has ambiguous/inconsistent effects on well-being depending on lots of things like frequency, who you express them to, etc.). I’m not sure how you’d separate those out in an LLM, where the thinking is the speech.
Thanks for a great comment! I had a sense something like this may be true, but never looked up the research.
On your second point, we have evidence that LLMs can think without speaking, i.e., they can do planning or reflection in the forward pass, and that’s current models and LLMs. It’s possible that in the future that will be even more common.