Evidence of Emotion
Julia Hirschberg
julia@cs.columbia.edu
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Agenda
• Class introductions
• Paper discussion
• Lessons learned:
– Formulating discussion questions
– Leading a discussion
• Future discussion leaders
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Controversies
• Do studies of emotion need a theoretical
framework or should we just ‘get back to
observable data’?
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Cornelius ’00: Theoretical Approaches to
Emotion
• Claims:
– Theories of emotion are essential to the study of
emotion
– They are actually implicit in work done by researcher
who may not be aware of their own assumptions
• What is the nature of emotion?
• How should we study emotion?
• How can we explain emotion?
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Four Perspectives
• Darwinian: Natural selection
– Function: Emotions evolve to help humans survive
– Same in everyone and similar in related species
• Similar display for Big 6+ (happiness, sadness, fear,
disgust, anger, surprise)  ‘basic’ emotions
• Similar understanding of emotion across cultures
• What is the evidence? Implications?
• Jamesian: Emotion is experience
– Perception of bodily changes  emotion
• ‘We are afraid because we run’ ?
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– Automatic responses to environment that help us
survive
– Each emotion accompanied by unique pattern of
bodily responses
– What is the evidence? Implications?
• Cognitive: Appraisal (e.g. Arnold’s “sense
judgments”)
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What is appraisal?
How does this relate to Darwin and James?
What is the evidence?
How has appraisal theory been criticized?
What consequences for studying emotion?
How identify appraisal components? E.g. happiness
Scherer’s (’87, ’99) stimulus/evaluation checks
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• Social Constructivism: Social Function/ Cultural
Dependence
– Emotions arise from learned social rules – what does
emotion X achieve in my culture? E.g. anger
– Gender and group differences
– Relationship with appraisal theory?
– Implications for study of emotion?
• Are these theories converging?
• What differences remain?
• Do we need to adopt a theory of emotion to study
emotion?
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Controversies
• Should the data we ‘observe’ be
– From natural speech (corpora)
– Elicited in laboratories
• From actors?
• From non-professional subjects?
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Acted Speech: LDC Emotional Speech
Corpus
happy
sad
angry
confident
frustrated
friendly
interested
anxious
bored
encouraging
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Is Natural Emotion Different? (thanks to
Liz Shriberg)
• Neutral
– July 30
– Yes
• Disappointed/tired
– No
• Amused/surprised
• Annoyed
– Yes
– Late morning
• Frustrated
– Yes
– No
– No, I am …
– …no Manila...
– No
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Wilting et al ’06: Real vs. acted emotional speech
• Research questions:
– Do actors feel acted emotions?
– Ecological validity: Is acted emotional speech the same
as ‘real’ emotional speech
• Terminology
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Within subjects vs. between subjects: pros and cons
Dependent and independent variables
Conditions
Debriefing
T-test, ANOVA, Tukey HSD
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• Audiovisual Experiments
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Hypothesis
Experimental design
Participants
Results
Conclusions
Are these good experiments?
Do they have any weaknesses?
Would you have done anything differently?
What can we conclude from these experiments?
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Enos & Hirschberg ’06: A New Approach to
Acted Emotional Speech
• What is the goal of this paper?
• What theoretical assumptions does it make?
– Which of Cornelius theories does it assume, if any?
– Abelson ’83: Cognitive Consistency Theory
• What do the authors propose to do to collect more
natural emotional speech?
– Scenario approach
– Script approach
– Do you think either would work? What are the
drawbacks?
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Nisimura et al ’06: Analyzing Dialogue Data for
Real-World Emotional Speech Classification
• Goal: Classify child utterances wrt ‘delightful’ or
‘hateable’ emotions
• How did they obtain and annotate the data?
• What was the method of analysis?
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Factor analysis
Support vector machine
Regression analysis
Jackknife method
• What can we conclude from this experiment?
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Asking Good Questions
• Think about higher level issues the authors raise
more than detail-oriented questions unless you
find some details controversial or confusing
– How does the paper relate to the general topic for this
week? What does it contribute?
– What are the controversial claims?
– Compare pros and cons of the approach – how could it
be improved?
– Compare points of agreement and disagreement with
the other papers
– Point out directions for future research
– What are the implications for the field?
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Leading Discussions
• Provide a framework/context for the approach
taken in the paper
• Highlight the main points and contributions
• Point out claims or results you find controversial
• Explain any technical points you think will be
difficult to understand
• Discussion leader assignments
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Next Week
• Read: Johnstone et al ’06, look at the Ekman
video and bio, look at the Wikipedia article on
FACS
• Prepare discussion questions on each
• Bring 2-3 ideas for your project to class
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