Emotion Recognition in a Multi-Componential Framework: The Role of Physiology

The Component Process Model is a well-established framework describing an emotion as a dynamic process with five highly interrelated components: cognitive appraisal, expression, motivation, physiology and feeling. Yet, few empirical studies have systematically investigated discrete emotions through this full multi-componential view. We therefore elicited various emotions during movie watching and measured their manifestations across these components. Our goal was to investigate the relationship between physiological measures and the theoretically defined components, as well as to determine whether discrete emotions could be predicted from the multicomponent response patterns. By deploying a data-driven computational approach based on multivariate pattern classification, our results suggest that physiological features are encoded within each component, supporting the hypothesis of a synchronized recruitment during an emotion episode. Overall, while emotion prediction was higher when classifiers were trained with all five components, a model without physiology features did not significantly reduce the performance. The findings therefore support a description of emotion as a multicomponent process, in which emotion recognition requires the integration of all the components. However, they also indicate that physiology per se is the least significant predictor for emotion classification among these five components.