Emotion Recognition based on Psychological Components in Guided Narratives for Emotion Regulation

Abstract: Emotion regulation is a crucial element in dealing with emotional events and has positive effects on mental health. This paper aims to provide a more comprehensive understanding of emotional events by introducing a new French corpus of emotional narratives collected using a questionnaire for emotion regulation. We follow the theoretical framework of the Component Process Model which considers emotions as dynamic processes composed of four interrelated components (behavior, feeling, thinking and territory). Each narrative is related to a discrete emotion and is structured based on all emotion components by the writers. We study the interaction of components and their impact on emotion classification with machine learning methods and pre-trained LLMs. Our results show that each component improves prediction performance, and that the best results are achieved by jointly considering all components. Our results also show the effectiveness of pre-trained LLMs in predicting discrete emotion from certain components, which reveal differences in how emotion components are expressed.