Survey on Ontologies for Affective States and Their Influences

Human behavior is impacted by emotion, mood, personality, needs and subjective well-being. Emotion and mood are human affective states while personality, needs and subjective well-being are influences on those affective states. Ontologies are a method of representing real-world knowledge, such as human affective states and their influences, in a format that a computer can process. They allow researchers to build systems that harness affective states. By unifying terms and meanings, ontologies enable these systems to communicate and share knowledge with each other. In this paper, we survey existing ontologies on affective states and their influences. We also provide the psychological background of affective states, their influences and representational models. The paper discusses a total of 20 ontologies on emotion, one ontology on mood, one ontology on needs, and 11 general purpose ontologies and lexicons. Based on the analysis of existing ontologies, we summarize and discuss the current state of the art in the field.