Concetti Chiave
Emotions are fundamentally linked to coping strategies that people use to deal with salient situations. This study introduces a novel corpus, COPING, to investigate how these coping strategies (attack, contact, distance, reject) are expressed in language and can be computationally identified.
Sintesi
The study explores the relationship between emotions and coping strategies, a concept that has been underexplored in natural language processing (NLP) research. The authors follow psychological theories that treat emotions as episodes where people cope with events, and that influence their behavior through action tendencies.
To investigate this, the authors constructed the COPING corpus through a role-playing approach. Participants were asked to impersonate fictional characters representing different coping strategies (attack, contact, distance, reject) and respond to controversial scenarios on topics like abortion, immigration, and LGBTQ+ rights.
The analysis of the corpus shows that:
- Participants were able to correctly associate the intended coping strategies with the corresponding emotional responses, aligning with psychological theories.
- The textual expressions of coping strategies varied in their clarity, with attack and contact being more easily recognized by both human annotators and computational models compared to distance and reject.
- Computational models, including fine-tuned language models and zero-shot classifiers, struggled to accurately identify the coping strategies expressed in the texts, suggesting that capturing these complex psychological constructs in language is a challenging task.
The study highlights the potential of using coping strategies to enhance emotion analysis in NLP, but also the difficulties in bridging psychological theories and computational approaches. The COPING corpus provides a valuable resource for further research in this direction.
Statistiche
"I could not disagree more with your statement."
"I understand your perspective, but I feel that your ideas could have serious consequences."
"I'm sure you have your reasons, but I don't agree with your opinion on this topic."
"I'm not interested in your negative views. I'd rather not discuss this further."
Citazioni
"Emotions can be considered episodes where people cope with an event, and that influence their behavior through action tendencies."
"Essentially, emotions can be considered episodes where people cope with an event, and that influence their behavior through action tendencies."
"Theories of coping have great visibility in research on virtual agents and robotics due to their ability to model emotions at the behavioral level, but their potential for studying emotions in language (as a specific type of behavior) has not been fully explored so far."