The Ontology of Emotions
The term ‘ontology’ is nowadays employed in the information-driven sciences to refer to a controlled structured vocabulary of terms used to describe the entities in a given domain of study. Ontologies of this sort are being successfully employed especially within the biomedical sciences, where they are used to annotate or tag scientific research results deriving from multiple heterogeneous sources to enable searching, integration and analysis of data within a single common framework.
We will describe the Emotion Ontology, which has been developed to support interdisciplinary research into emotions and other affective phenomena in fields such as cognitive neuroscience, behavioral psychology, psychiatry, literary analysis, and artificial intelligence. Problems arise because each of these disciplines has its own separate terminology and systems of codes. The ontology provides a common language in which results gathered separately can be brought together into a single whole.
To be effective, the terms and relations in an ontology must be provided with logical definitions which enable reasoning with the data, and it is at this point that philosophical issues play a role. We summarize the philosophical background of contemporary ontology research, pointing above all to the work of Husserl. We then outline how emotions are defined in the ontological framework, setting forth their relations to acts of appraisal, subjective feelings, emotional action tendencies, and physiological responses. We also sketch how ontology-tagged data is being used for purposes of what is called ‘sentiment mining’ for example in identifying subjects with high risk of suicide. We conclude with an application of the Emotion Ontology to aproblems in aesthetics relating to the pleasure people experience when watching horror films while undergoing the normally unpleasurable subjective feelings associated with fear.