Appraisal Theories for Emotion Classification in Text
Table 1: The locations of emotions along appraisal PCA dimensions, as published by Smith1985, Table 6. The top part corresponds to those emotions we consider in our work here.
['Emotion', 'Unpleasant', 'Responsibility', 'Uncertainty', 'Attention', 'Effort', 'Control']
We argue in this paper that this makes appraisals particularly useful for natural language processing, because they both provide a framework for research and represent a way of enriching existing data. As a matter of fact, few dimensions are sufficient to explain emotions based on cognitive appraisal. \newciteSmith1985 explain 15 emotions based on pleasantness (polarity), self-other responsibility/control (for initiating the situation), certainty (about what is going on), attention (whether the emotion stimulus is worth attending), anticipated effort (the amount of physical or mental activation before the stimulus), and situational control (the ability to cope with the situation). In this paper, we focus on modelling the cognitive components described by \newciteSmith1985. Results are consistent in most cases. These two are also the emotions that annotators associated with control more than others. Attention is prominent for events that elicited anger and which were under the control of others, as suggested by the low situational control. The highest situational control, on the contrary, appears with the data points labeled as fear, also characterized by a strong feeling of uncertainty and anticipated effort. There are also dissimilarities between the two tables, like the level of attention, reaching the lowest score for disgust in their study and not in ours. They also find that situational control is a stronger indicator for shame than for guilt, while effort is more marked in our sadness-related events than theirs.