Experiments on real-life emotions challenge Ekman's model

Abstract

Ekman's emotions (1992) are defined as universal basic emotions. Over the years, alternative models have emerged (e.g. Greene and Haidt 2002; Barrett 2017) describing emotions as social and linguistic constructions. The variety of models existing today raises the question of whether the abstraction provided by such models is sufficient as a descriptive/predictive tool for representing real-life emotional situations. Our study presents a social inquiry to test whether traditional models are sufficient to capture the complexity of daily life emotions, reported in a textual context. The intent of the study is to establish the human-subject agreement rate in an annotated corpus based on Ekman's theory (Entity-Level Tweets Emotional Analysis) and the human-subject agreement rate when using Ekman's emotions to annotate sentences that don’t respect the Ekman’s model (The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows). Furthermore, we investigated how much alexithymia can influence the human ability to detect and categorise emotions. On a total sample of 114 subjects, our results show low within subjects agreement rates for both datasets, particularly for subjects with low levels of alexithymia; low levels of agreement with the original annotations; frequent use of emotions based on Ekman model, particularly negative one, in people with high levels of alexithymia.