| --- |
| task_categories: |
| - text-classification |
| language: |
| - en |
| tags: |
| - psychological defense mechanism |
| - supportive conversations |
| - mental health |
| - AI for mental health |
| pretty_name: PsyDefConv |
| size_categories: |
| - 1K<n<10K |
| license: cc-by-nc-4.0 |
| --- |
| # PsyDefConv |
| |
| **PsyDefConv** is the first conversational dataset annotating **Defense Mechanism Rating Scale (DMRS)** defense levels at the utterance level, built on top of [ESConv](https://github.com/thu-coai/Emotional-Support-Conversation). |
| |
| 📄 Paper: *You Never Know a Person, You Only Know Their Defenses: Detecting Levels of Psychological Defense Mechanisms in Supportive Conversations* (ACL 2026) |
| |
| ## Overview |
| |
| - **200 dialogues / 2,336 seeker utterances** labeled with defense levels |
| - **9 labels**: 7 DMRS levels + `No Defense` (0) + `Needs More Information` (8) |
| - **Double-blind annotation**, Cohen's κ = **0.639** (substantial) |
| - **80/20 stratified split** (train / test) |
| ## Label Scheme |
| |
| | Label | Name | |
| |------:|------| |
| | 0 | No Defense | |
| | 1 | Action | |
| | 2 | Major Image-Distorting | |
| | 3 | Disavowal | |
| | 4 | Minor Image-Distorting | |
| | 5 | Neurotic | |
| | 6 | Obsessional | |
| | 7 | High-Adaptive | |
| | 8 | Needs More Information | |
| |
| See the paper for full definitions and examples. |
|
|
| ## Citation |
| |
| ```bibtex |
| @inproceedings{na-etal-2026-psydefconv, |
| title = "You Never Know a Person, You Only Know Their Defenses: |
| Detecting Levels of Psychological Defense Mechanisms |
| in Supportive Conversations", |
| author = "Na, Hongbin and Wang, Zimu and Chen, Zhaoming and |
| Zhou, Peilin and Hua, Yining and Zhou, Grace Ziqi and |
| Zhang, Haiyang and Shen, Tao and Wang, Wei and |
| Torous, John and Ji, Shaoxiong and Chen, Ling", |
| booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational |
| Linguistics: ACL 2026", |
| month = jul, |
| year = "2026", |
| address = "San Diego, USA", |
| publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", |
| } |
| ``` |
| |
| Please also cite ESConv (Liu et al., 2021). |
