Emotion Twenty Questions: Toward a Crowd-Sourced Theory of Emotions

This paper introduces a method for developing a socially-constructed theory of emotions that aims to reflect the aggregated judgments of ordinary people about emotion terms. Emotion Twenty Questions (EMO20Q) is a dialog-based game that is similar to the familiar Twenty Questions game except that the object of guessing is the name for an emotion, rather than an arbitrary object. The game is implemented as a dyadic computer chat application using the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP). We describe the idea of a theory that is socially-constructed by design, or crowd-sourced, as opposed to the de facto social construction of theories by the scientific community. This paper argues that such a subtle change in paradigm is useful when studying natural usage of emotion words, which can mean different things to different people but still contain a shared, socially-defined meaning that can be arrived at through conversational dialogs. The game of EMO20Q provides a framework for demonstrating this shared meaning and, moreover, provides a standardized way for collecting the judgments of ordinary people. The paper offers preliminary results of EMO20Q pilot experiments, showing that such a game is feasible and that it generates a range of questions that can be used to describe emotions.