Emotions are fundamental to conversational understanding. While significant advancements have been achieved in conversational emotion recognition and emotional response generation, recognizing the causes of eliciting emotions is less explored. Previous studies have primarily focused on identifying the causes of emotions by understanding verbal contextual utterances, overlooking that non-verbal emotional cues can elicit emotions. To address this issue, we develop an Emotional Contagion Graph Network (ECGN) that simulates the impact of non-verbal implicit emotions on the counterpart’s emotions. To achieve this, we construct a heterogeneous graph that simulates the transmission of non-verbal emotions alongside verbal influences. By applying message passing between nodes, the constructed graph effectively models both the implicit emotional dynamics and explicit verbal interactions. We evaluate ECGN’s performance through extensive experiments on the benchmark datasets and compare it against multiple state-of-the-art models. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model. Our code is available at https://github.com/Yu-Fangxu/ECGN.

Emotion Recognition in Conversation (ERC) involves detecting the underlying emotion behind each utterance within a conversation. Effectively generating representations for utterances remains a significant challenge in this task. Recent works propose various models to address this issue, but they still struggle with differentiating similar emotions such as excitement and happiness. To alleviate this problem, We propose an Emotion-Anchored Contrastive Learning (EACL) framework that can generate more distinguishable utterance representations for similar emotions. To achieve this, we utilize label encodings as anchors to guide the learning of utterance representations and design an auxiliary loss to ensure the effective separation of anchors for similar emotions. Moreover, an additional adaptation process is proposed to adapt anchors to serve as effective classifiers to improve classification performance. Across extensive experiments, our proposed EACL achieves state-of-the-art emotion recognition performance and exhibits superior performance on similar emotions. Our code is available at https://github.com/Yu-Fangxu/EACL.