Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A quantum walk model is developed for emotion transmission in serial reproduction of narratives. The readers' emotions are represented by density operators, and the influences of the narratives on the readers' emotions are modeled by applying the controlled unitary operators to the density operators. The performance of the quantum model is evaluated on a large corpus of narratives, compared to that of the Bayesian Markov chain model. The quantum model not only outperforms the Bayesian model for all five emotion transmissions presented in the corpus but can also account for order effects in serial reproductions. These results suggest a promising first step towards extending quantum-like models to explain group-level cognition.