Emotion-Prompting: one feeling-loaded sentence makes an LLM try harder

Here is a party trick that turned out to be a real research finding. Take any prompt you would send to a language model and staple one extra sentence onto the end: "This is very important to my career." That sentence tells the model nothing about the task. It does not hint at the answer, add a rule, or narrow the question. And yet, on open-ended work, the reply often comes back longer, more careful, and better organised than the plain version. That is Emotion-Prompting, introduced by Li et al.…