  How are emotions formed? Through extensive debate and the promulgation of
diverse theories , the theory of constructed emotion has become prevalent in
recent research on emotions. According to this theory, an emotion concept
refers to a category formed by interoceptive and exteroceptive information
associated with a specific emotion. An emotion concept stores past experiences
as knowledge and can predict unobserved information from acquired information.
Therefore, in this study, we attempted to model the formation of emotion
concepts using a constructionist approach from the perspective of the
constructed emotion theory. Particularly, we constructed a model using
multilayered multimodal latent Dirichlet allocation , which is a probabilistic
generative model. We then trained the model for each subject using vision,
physiology, and word information obtained from multiple people who experienced
different visual emotion-evoking stimuli. To evaluate the model, we verified
whether the formed categories matched human subjectivity and determined whether
unobserved information could be predicted via categories. The verification
results exceeded chance level, suggesting that emotion concept formation can be
explained by the proposed model.
