Why is an Event Affective? Classifying Affective Events based on Human Needs

Affective events are events that impact people in positive or negative ways. When people discuss an event, people understand not only the affective polarity but also the reason for the event being positive or negative. In this paper, we aim to categorize affective events based on the reasons why events are affective. We propose that an event is affective to people often because the event describes or indicates the satisfaction or violation of certain kind of human needs. For example, the event “I broke my leg” affects people negatively because the need to be physically healthy is violated. “I play computer games” has a positive affect on people because the need to have fun is probably satisfied. To categorize affective events in narrative human language, we define seven common human need categories and introduce a new data set of randomly sampled affective events with manual human need annotations. In addition, we explored two types of methods: a LIWC lexicon based method and supervised classifiers to automatically categorize affective event expressions with respect to human needs. Experiments show that these methods achieved moderate performance on this task.