Task Complexity Matters: An Empirical Study of Reasoning in LLMs for Sentiment Analysis

A comprehensive study of 504 AI model configurations reveals that reasoning capabilities in large language models are highly task-dependent, with simple tasks like binary classification actually degrading by up to 19.9 percentage points while complex 27-class emotion recognition improves by up to 16.0 points. The research challenges the assumption that reasoning universally improves AI performance across all language tasks.