Comparing the Believability of Emotion and Event Utterances

People often make utterances about the emotional state of someone or an event that happened in order to explain that person’s behavior. While there exist theories on behavior explanations, there is to my knowledge no study that focuses on the difference between emotion and event utterances that serve as behavior explanations. However, emotion as a mental state has a unique characteristic of being accessible only by the subject. In this paper, I hypothesize that there must be a difference between the degree of believability of emotion utterances and that of event utterances. I describe a model of behavior explanation that incorporates the idea that utterances may be accepted as credible or discarded. I conduct experiments to show that my model’s predictions fit behavioral data most closely when its noise parameters reflect my hypothesis. I discuss the results, implications, and possible next steps.