Modeling Emotion Understanding in Stories: Insights from Traumatic Brain Injured Patients

In this paper, we describe a case study in emotion understanding in stories that leverages the contribution of traumatic brain injured people. In particular, we focus on moral emotions, leveraging the differences in moral functioning that characterizes traumatic brain injured patients. By comparing the understanding of the moral and emotional aspects of characters’ behavior in traumatic brain injured patients and in a control group of neurologically healthy subjects, we observed slight, yet meaningful differences in the two groups. We describe the test methodology and results, discussing their implications for the design of rehabilitation applications that leverage virtual characters.