Dealing with Controversy: An Emotion and Coping Strategy Corpus Based on Role Playing (2024)

Abstract: There is a mismatch between psychological and computational studies on emotions. Psychological research aims at explaining and documenting internal mechanisms of these phenomena, while computational work often simplifies them into labels. Many emotion fundamentals remain under-explored in natural language processing, particularly how emotions develop and how people cope with them. To help reduce this gap, we follow theories on coping, and treat emotions as strategies to cope with salient situations (i.e., how people deal with emotion-eliciting events). This approach allows us to investigate the link between emotions and behavior, which also emerges in language. We introduce the task of coping identification, together with a corpus to do so, constructed via role-playing. We find that coping strategies realize in text even though they are challenging to recognize, both for humans and automatic systems trained and prompted on the same task. We thus open up a promising research direction to enhance the capability of models to better capture emotion mechanisms from text.

## introduction in the last decades, natural language processing (nlp) has examined the interaction between language and emotions from different angles, including text generation and understanding @xcite @xcite . this work has resulted in the creation of many resources for processing affect in text @xcite , largely based on psychological theories that treat emotions as either discrete labels or vectors in a space defined by the dimensions of valence, arousal * the first three authors contributed equally. ## related work we now summarize the concepts of coping and emotions, and related nlp research. ## data creation methodology textual data associated with coping strategies is hard to obtain. ideally, since coping is a response to an appraised situation, both the situation itself and the textually expressed coping strategy should be known -but the former may be external to the text and impossible to track. moreover, coping strategies rarely appear as naturally-occurring labels of texts (e.g., as hashtags assigned by writers), and they involve complex concepts which might be unfamiliar to laypeople (i.e., the psychological sense of attack, contact, distance and reject). we solve these issues by resorting to a roleplaying approach inspired by the paradigm of improvisational theater @xcite and supported by research on character identification @xcite : instead of annotating existing data, participants engage in a make-pretend activity in which they write new texts while (purposefully) instantiating a given coping strategy. 1 we approximate the collection of data from first-hand experiencers of coping. we apply this approach as in figure 1 . we start by gathering the building blocks of the role-playing study (section 3.1), namely, definitions for the four strategies and texts depicting scenarios in which these might be triggered. based on such definitions and scenarios, we stimulate the production of coping-expressing utterances (section 3.2). ## the coping corpus coping contains 1, 200 data points, balanced among coping strategies, topics, and scenarios. on average, the length of x's answer to y is 34.8 to-6 details on questionnaires and participants in appendix c. kens foot_6 , that of texts about x's behaviors is 23.6. we now analyze the corpus to investigate if the four descriptions of x (such as that in ## discussion and conclusion this paper follows a recent wave of studies @xcite that initiated a dialogue with other disciplines (like psychology), to broaden the tools of computational emotion analysis and push forward its potential to shed light on how emotions work in language. we focused on the entanglement between emotions and coping strategies, never-before explored in nlp. our goal was to understand if emotion-bearing texts allow to infer affective information that goes beyond discrete emotion experiences as captured by emotion labels, extending to their core motives of "seeking more or less" of a stimulus. identifying coping strategies computationally could indeed benefit emotion analysis in multiple ways, as it can be instrumental for different downstream objectives, for instance to understand argumentative strategies, revealing how people react to verbal conflicts. leveraging coping strategies is also valuable to establish connections with other theoretical and computational frameworks. one can identify coping strategies in a multi-task setup to better identify the emotions of a text (e.g., based on ekman's theory), or explore their link with appraisal theories in event-centered emotion analysis @xcite , to explain how events (e.g., those described in our scenarios) are evaluated or re-appraised (cf. @xcite . such integrated approaches promise a comprehensive understanding of emotions that is still ripe for investigation. as a first contribution in this direction, we built a corpus for coping detection via role-playing. roleplaying enabled us to overcome the lack of available textual data annotated with coping information. moreover, it facilitated our attempt to communicate abstract constructs to laypeople, and to gain control over many variables (e.g., all people had the goal of realizing a coping strategy, in response to the same controversial statements, on a small set of topics) but at the same time it introduced some artifacts. notably, the expression and identification of coping strongly relied on our ability to communicate them in x's descriptions, as well as people's ability to understand such descriptions, to engage in role-playing, and to produce goodquality, coping-expressing texts. therefore, both the quality of the texts and the classification results are to be discussed while considering the challenges introduced by our data collection procedure: the participants in our study demonstrated a robust understanding of coping within a strict experimental setup -corroborating that data on this psychological concept can be obtained via crowdsourcing; the texts they produced, on the other hand, generally do not exhibit characteristics that allowed our readers or automatic classifiers to perfectly discern the correct coping strategies. it remains to be determined whether this is due to the intentionality of coping expression (despite evidence that the crowdworkers' acting was successful) or because these strategies are naturally communicated in covert manners, making them hard to discern. overall, the emergence of coping from text appears less straightforward than we initially hypothesized, but this conclusion is not definitive, as one could still expect that, were the texts produced for counter-arguing purposes (like ours) but spontaneously (unlike ours), the attack, contact, distance, or reject mechanisms might be clearer. in fact, the possible recognition of coping, and the idea that these strategies lend themselves for annotation is corroborated by our analysis of their link to emotions -with meaningful patterns that find substantial correspondence in roseman's literature. this hints at the great potential of coping to be used for future tasks. its construction relied on several preliminary rounds of crowdsourcing which corroborated the difficulty of our tasks for laypeople. we simplified it via role-playing, but this strategy required us to embrace some simplifying assumptions. first and foremost, texts were not generated while experiencing the emotion(s) necessary to implement a coping strategy. the conflictual situations depicted in the scenarios had the potential to stir an emotion, but we did not measure their success in this sense, and we recognize that imagining to feel an emotion is not the same (in terms of cognitive and physiological processes) as actually feeling one. to mitigate this problem, we assigned participants to the topics they might feel more related to by opening the studies to crowdworkers with specific demographics (e.g., women for the abortion topic). this decision was also based on simplifying assumptions, namely, that demographics approximate one's experiences and involvement in the given topic, and that the understanding of laypeople would reflect in their ability to generate texts. overall, our setup does not necessarily correspond to one that psychological research on coping would adopt: albeit useful, coping strategies still require us to reflect on how to more seamlessly connect emotion-based nlp and the disciplines from which we borrow theoretical constructs.