{"pk":24404,"title":"Intervening on Emotions by Planning Over a Theory of Mind","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Much of social cognition involves reasoning about others'\nminds: predicting their reactions, inferring their feelings, and\nexplaining their behavior. By representing mental contents like\nbeliefs, desires, and emotions, Bayesian theory of mind mod-\nels have made progress in capturing how humans manage these\ncognitive feats. But social life is not merely observation: hu-\nmans must also plan to intervene on these same mental con-\ntents. The present work models how people choose interven-\ntions to influence others' emotions. Building on a prior model\nof people's intuitive theory of emotions, we model how people\nuse their intuitive theory to evaluate and simulate the effects\nof different interventions. We apply our model to data from\nbehavioral experiments requiring counterfactual and joint in-\nterventions, and show a close alignment with human choices.\nOur results provide a step towards a potentially unifying expla-\nnation for emotion prediction and intervention, suggesting that\nthey could arise from the same underlying generative model.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Psychology; Emotion; Theory of Mind; Bayesian modeling"}],"section":"Papers with Poster Presentation","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4gz7c85c","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Tony","middle_name":"","last_name":"Chen","name_suffix":"","institution":"MIT","department":""},{"first_name":"Sean","middle_name":"Dae","last_name":"Houlihan","name_suffix":"","institution":"Dartmouth","department":""},{"first_name":"Kartik","middle_name":"","last_name":"Chandra","name_suffix":"","institution":"MIT","department":""},{"first_name":"Josh","middle_name":"","last_name":"Tenenbaum","name_suffix":"","institution":"MIT","department":""},{"first_name":"Rebecca","middle_name":"","last_name":"Saxe","name_suffix":"","institution":"MIT","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2024-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/24404/galley/14001/download/"},{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/24404/galley/21302/download/"}]}