Study of Emotion Concept Formation by Integrating Vision, Physiology, and Word Information using Multilayered Multimodal Latent Dirichlet Allocation

How are emotions formed? Through extensive debate and the promulgation of diverse theories , the theory of constructed emotion has become prevalent in recent research on emotions. According to this theory, an emotion concept refers to a category formed by interoceptive and exteroceptive information associated with a specific emotion. An emotion concept stores past experiences as knowledge and can predict unobserved information from acquired information. Therefore, in this study, we attempted to model the formation of emotion concepts using a constructionist approach from the perspective of the constructed emotion theory. Particularly, we constructed a model using multilayered multimodal latent Dirichlet allocation , which is a probabilistic generative model. We then trained the model for each subject using vision, physiology, and word information obtained from multiple people who experienced different visual emotion-evoking stimuli. To evaluate the model, we verified whether the formed categories matched human subjectivity and determined whether unobserved information could be predicted via categories. The verification results exceeded chance level, suggesting that emotion concept formation can be explained by the proposed model.