FreakOut-LLM: The Effect of Emotional Stimuli on Safety Alignment
Safety-aligned LLMs go through refusal training to reject harmful requests, but whether these mechanisms remain effective under emotionally charged stimuli is unexplored. We introduce FreakOut-LLM, a framework investigating whether emotional context compromises safety alignment in adversarial settings. Using validated psychological stimuli, we evaluate how emotional priming through system prompts affects jailbreak susceptibility across ten LLMs. We test three conditions (stress, relaxation, neut
Record details
Published: 5 April 2026
Source: arXiv
Category: Research
Topics: Safety & alignment · Finance, VC & PE
Retrieved: 14 July 2026
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ethics.ai (5 April 2026), “FreakOut-LLM: The Effect of Emotional Stimuli on Safety Alignment,” evidence record 6349, https://ethics.ai/record/6349 (originally published by arXiv).
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