Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We present a generative model of how observers think about the emotions experienced by players in a socially-chargedgame: a public, high-stakes, one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma. The model extends inverse planning frameworks to captureobservers’ judgments about players’ reactions to hypothetical events. Observers attribute different beliefs and values toplayers based on what decisions the players make. We model how observers’ noisy inferences of players’ mental contentsbias emotion predictions. Incorporation of non-monetary features into forward planning enables us to model emotions thatreflect complex social concerns (e.g. Embarrassment depends on how much players think others will infer that they tried totake advantage of their opponents). In addition to matching the intensities of twenty attributed emotions, the model reflectshow observers’ emotion judgments covary within single stimuli, indicating that the model captures important aspects ofthe generative process underlying humans’ emotion attributions in this game.