Emotions in Argumentation: an Empirical Evaluation

Argumentation is often seen as a mechanism to support different forms of reasoning such that decision-making and persuasion, but all these approaches assume a purely rational behavior of the involved actors. However, humans are proved to behave differently, mixing rational and emotional attitudes to guide their actions, and it has been claimed that there exists a strong connection between the argumentation process and the emotions felt by people involved in such process. In this paper, we assess this claim by means of an experiment: during several debates people's argumentation in plain English is connected and compared to the emotions automatically detected from the participants. Our results show a correspondence between emotions and argumentation elements, e.g., when in the argumentation two opposite opinions are conflicting this is reflected in a negative way on the debaters' emotions.

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