@inproceedings{yeo-jaidka-2025-beyond,
    title = "Beyond Context to Cognitive Appraisal: Emotion Reasoning as a Theory of Mind Benchmark for Large Language Models",
    author = "Yeo, Gerard Christopher  and
      Jaidka, Kokil",
    editor = "Che, Wanxiang  and
      Nabende, Joyce  and
      Shutova, Ekaterina  and
      Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025",
    month = jul,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Vienna, Austria",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/transition-to-people-yaml/2025.findings-acl.1359/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.findings-acl.1359",
    pages = "26517--26525",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-256-5",
    abstract = "Datasets used for emotion recognition tasks typically contain overt cues that can be used in predicting the emotions expressed in a text. However, one challenge is that texts sometimes contain covert contextual cues that are rich in affective semantics, which warrant higher-order reasoning abilities to infer emotional states, not simply the emotions conveyed. This study advances beyond surface-level perceptual features to investigate how large language models (LLMs) reason about others' emotional states using contextual information, within a Theory-of-Mind (ToM) framework. Grounded in Cognitive Appraisal Theory, we curate a specialized ToM evaluation dataset to assess both forward reasoning{---}from context to emotion{---}and backward reasoning{---}from emotion to inferred context. We showed that LLMs can reason to a certain extent, although they are poor at associating situational outcomes and appraisals with specific emotions. Our work highlights the need for psychological theories in the training and evaluation of LLMs in the context of emotion reasoning."
}