Emotion Dynamics in Movie Dialogues

Abstract

Emotion dynamics is a framework for measuring how an individual's emotions change over time. It is a powerful tool for understanding how we behave and interact with the world. In this paper, we introduce a framework to track emotion dynamics through one's utterances. Specifically we introduce a number of utterance emotion dynamics (UED) metrics inspired by work in Psychology. We use this approach to trace emotional arcs of movie characters. We analyze thousands of such character arcs to test hypotheses that inform our broader understanding of stories. Notably, we show that there is a tendency for characters to use increasingly more negative words and become increasingly emotionally discordant with each other until about 90 percent of the narrative length. UED also has applications in behavior studies, social sciences, and public health.

arXiv comment19 pages, 7 figures

References in corpus (5)

• NLTK: The Natural Language Toolkit
• The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapes
• From Once Upon a Time to Happily Ever After: Tracking Emotions in Novels and Fairy Tales
• Practical and Ethical Considerations in the Effective use of Emotion and Sentiment Lexicons
• An Annotated Dataset of Coreference in English Literature