Exploring the Frontiers of LLMs in Psychological Applications: A Comprehensive Review

As general-purpose cognitive models (Binz & Schulz, 2023a), LLMs offer new perspectives and approaches for research in the fields of cognitive and behavioral psychology, clinical and counseling psychology, educational and developmental psychology, and social and cultural psychology, at different time scales of human behavior (Fig. 1a). LLMs can also be used as research aids (Fig. 1c) to help psychologists with everything from literature reviews (Aydın & Karaarslan, 2022; Qureshi et al., 2023), experimental subjects (Dillion et al., 2023; Hutson, 2023), and data analysis (Patel & Fan, 2023; Peters & Matz, 2023; Rathje et al., 2023) to promote scholarly communication: academic writing (Dergaa et al., 2023; Stokel-Walker, 2022) or peer review (Chiang & Lee, 2023; Van Dis et al., 2023). Thus, LLMs can potentially become research assistants for psychologists, helping them improve their research efficiency.