Deep Learning-Based Feature Fusion for Emotion Analysis and Suicide Risk Differentiation in Chinese Psychological Support Hotlines

Mental health is a significant global public health issue, and psychological support hotlines play a crucial role in providing mental health assistance and identifying suicide risks at an early stage. However, the emotional expressions conveyed during these calls remain underexplored in current research. This study introduces a novel method that combines pitch acoustic features with deep learning-based features to analyze and understand emotions expressed during hotline interactions. Using data from China's largest psychological support hotline, which includes 105 subjects, our method achieved an F1-score of 79.13% for negative binary emotion classification. Additionally, the proposed approach was validated on an open dataset for multi-class emotion classification, where it demonstrated better performance compared to the state-of-the-art methods. To explore its clinical relevance, we applied the model to analysis the frequency of negative emotions and the rate of emotional change in the conversation, comparing 46 subjects with suicidal behavior to those without. While the suicidal group exhibited more frequent emotional changes than the non-suicidal group, the difference was not statistically significant. Importantly, our findings suggest that emotional fluctuation intensity and frequency could serve as novel features for psychological assessment scales and suicide risk prediction. The proposed method provides valuable insights into emotional dynamics and has the potential to advance early intervention and improve suicide prevention strategies through integration with clinical tools and assessments. The source code is publicly available at: https://github.com/Sco-field/Speechemotionrecognition/tree/main.