Representing Emotions as Dynamic Interactions of Symbols: A Case Study on Literary Texts

This chapter proposes an emotional architecture organized around three pairs of antithetic universal symbols, or archetypes, derived from analytic psychology and anthropological accounts of mythical thinking. Their functions, relationships and interactions, on different levels of complexity within a dynamical system that mimics human emotional processes, are described by a formal model and a constructed ontology. The aim of the model is characterizing symbolic reasoning and figurative and analogue mechanisms of mental imagery associated with the internal representations of events. An automatic method for metaphor recognition and interpretation is proposed, targeting the identification of the proposed universal symbols in literary texts.