Comparing Human Roleplayers and LLM-Simulated Clients in Online Counselling Training: An Analysis of Counselling Patterns
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This study investigates the capabilities of Large Language Models to simulate counselling clients in educational role-plays in comparison to human role-players. Initially, we recorded role-playing sessions, where novice counsellors interacted with human peers acting as clients, followed by role-plays between humans and clients simulated by Mistrals Mixtral 8x7b using 4-bit quantization. These interactions were analysed with a counselling communication pattern system at sentence level. We investigated two key questions: (1) to what extent LLM-generated responses replicate authentic conversational dynamics and (2) whether counsellors' communication behaviour differs when interacting with human versus LLM-simulated clients. The findings highlight both similarities and differences in the application of counselling patterns across scenarios, showing the potential of LLM-based role-playing exercises to enhance counselling competencies and to identify areas for further refinement in virtual client simulations.
Authors: Eric Rudolph, Philipp Steigerwald, Jens Albrecht
Language: English
Subfield: Social Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W6893257667
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