The Hourglass of Emotions

The Hourglass of Emotions

Erik Cambria, Andrew Livingstone, Amir Hussain

Abstract

Human emotions and their modelling are increasingly understood to be a crucial aspect in the development of intelligent systems.

Over
the past years, in fact, the adoption of psychological models of
emotions has become a common trend among researchers and engineers
working in the sphere of affective computing. Because of the elusive
nature of emotions and the ambiguity of natural language, however,
psychologists have developed many different affect models, which often
are not suitable for the design of applications in fields such as
affective HCI, social data mining, and sentiment analysis.

To this
end, we propose a novel biologically-inspired and
psychologically-motivated emotion categorisation model that goes beyond
mere categorical and dimensional approaches. Such model represents
affective states both through labels and through four independent but
concomitant affective dimensions, which can potentially describe the
full range of emotional experiences that are rooted in any of us.

Keywords

Cognitive and Affective Modelling, NLP, Affective HCI

LNCS 7403 – The Hourglass of Emotions

The Hourglass of Emotions

Introduction