RE: [Heartlogic-dev] OHL v2 alpha test

[William L. Jarrold]

On Sun, 27 Mar 2005, Joshua N Pritikin wrote:

> On Sat, 2005-03-26 at 14:55 -0600, William L. Jarrold wrote:
> > Now that I get it a little better I could suggest better wordings.
> > E.g. "Toby feels confused, he is unsure whether daddy is denying
> > OJ because he is bigger and has more power than Toby or is it
> > do to a rule that Toby and daddy must obey."
>
> That is better.  I have merged your suggestion into the code.
>
> > But still I think that generating something like that in a non-hack
> > authentic way is way beyond our abilities.
>
> Agreed.

Great.

> > > What is worth stating is that there is a pretty clear separation between
> > > the model and the database.  I can provide a list of queries I run on
> > > the KM model.  The database only stores the cues, possible appraisals,
> > > and, optionally, the expected believability.
> >
> > Ah. Okay.  Eventually we might wanto have a live model.  Whatever.
>
> Sure.  I don't see why we can't have both a live model and a static
> model.

Sure.

> > > Branches which are not believable are not searched.
> >
> > But getting ratings of things that we have hypothesized our unbelieable
> > is essential to verifying our hypothesis.  If our theory predicts Blah
> > is unbelievable, then we need to test it.  Maybe it would help to
> > have re-skimming of my dissertation of the table of contents?  I should do
> > this too.
>
> Oops, I have not explained the idea clearly enough.  See below:
>
> > > Because I believe the emotion is dependent on the reason.  Hence, if
> > > the reason is unbelievable then there is no point in rating the
> emotion.
> > Well, it might make sense to have several ratings per item.  E.g. a
> rating
> > of the believability of the emotion alone in response to the scenario
> cue,
> > of the reason alone in response to the scenario cue and of the reason
> and
> > the emotion together
>
> Sure, but have you thought carefully about what it would mean to have
> those three ratings (reason alone, emotion alone, reason and emotion
> together)?  Consider your scenario *H3.  The model generates three
> appraisals:
>
> ((:seq TypeIIAppraisal *Happy "At least she gets to get attention from
> her mom.")
> (:seq TypeIIAppraisal-B *Happy "At least she gets to have fruit.")
> (:seq TypeIIIAppraisal *Sad "She did not get what she wanted."))
>
> What if I don't believe in Type-II appraisals?  Given a Type-II
> appraisal, what is the point of asking about the emotion?  This is not a
> rhetorical question, try to answer.

Perhaps our theory is incomplete.  Perhaps there are reasons that our 
model that does not generate such that she feels happy.  If so, then
people would say the emotion happy was believable but the reason was not 
believable.  And the emotion and reason together  is not believable.

We would want to know about such cases because this would be a clue that
we needed other reasons that concluded happy.

This is an example of why we would want to ask about the emotion alone,
the reason alone, and the two together.

> Another way to look at it is: What is the main idea of cognitive
> appraisal theory?  Cognition influences our emotions.  In other words,
> emotion _depend_ on cognitions, to some extent.  So the idea is, let's
> make the dependency explicit by:
>
> 1. Rate the cognitive part of the appraisal.
> 2. For believable cognitive reasons, rate the emotion part of the
> appraisal.
>
> For example, if I disbelieve Type-II style appraisals then there is no
> need to question about the associated emotion.  If I believe in Type-II
> (and Type-III) appraisals then everything goes along as usual in WLJ
> 2003 style with rating reversed and unreversed emotions.

Well, see my response above.

Another reason is that we want to have an experimental condition in 
which we reverse the valence of the emotions.  Remember?  This was
a very important part of the experimental design.  Here is a general
heuristic for understanding an experiment:  if you can't name the 
dependent and independent variables from memory, you do not understannd 
the experiment.

Another reason to have them rate every emotion  might be that the 
statistics are more analyzable if things are balanced.   I would have to 
make an apt with statistical services to be sure of this.

> For reference, level 'm' is the cognitive part of the appraisal and
> level 'M' is the emotion part.

Have you been building windows software?  Why not call the cognitive part 
COG or somewsuch and the emotion part EMO or somewsuch???  Whatever. (-:

> > > I haven't integrated all the levels of appraisal but this would be easy
> > > to do.  Each level (should) depends on earlier levels.  So by the time
> > > we get to level 'm' (the level of your dissertation), there is a
> > > empirically tested believable overriding goal from level 'g'.
> >
> > I'm not sure what you men by empirically testing the overriding goal?
> > Are you testing that the goal is one that is believable for kids to have?
>
> In a sense, yes.
>
> Level 'g' is concerned with classifying a participant's goal status as #
> $Goal, #$AntiGoal, or #$NoGoal.  Unsurprisingly, all the kids seem to
> have a #$Goal.  The parents, on the other hand, can be construed in more
> diverse ways.

So at this level you are trying to get people to rate whether the supposed 
goal is actually somethign kids in general want (#$Goal), do not want 
(#$AntiGoal), or are agnostic about having or not having (#$NoGoal).  Is 
that what you are wanting to do there?

> I haven't gone back and studied the rating comments we got last year
> from the old OHL site, but I bet that some of the comments can be traced
> back to the underspecified goal status of the parents.  Granted, it's
> just a gut feeling.  I'll have to investigate at some point.

Huh?  I'm not sure what you mean here.

There is plenty of stuff that is underspecified in the dissertation items. 
My hope is that we can get a sense for generic objects, very generic 
situations.  And then we can gradually add more complexity and richness 
to the stories.

> > > If daddy doesn't give Toby the orange juice that he's after then on what
> > > basis is daddy able to deny Toby?  Is it a matter of law, which compares
> > > withholding orange juice to stealing a car?  Or is it merely that daddy,
> > > as the parent, can make a unilateral decision (might)?
> >
> > So, this is a kind of open ended thought that Toby might have about how he
> > feels.  It is a very complex cognition.  Little kids don't think about
> > laws like this.  If you believe in Kolhberg's stages of moral development
> > (probably a pretty old-fashioned idea by now) then Toby is probably at
> > what Kolhberg (K) woudl call the "me first" stage.  I'd say eventually we
> > do want to get to that level of sophistication.  But right now we still
> > don't even know if something as simple as goal substitution will work
> > successfully in a knowledge based system.
> >
> > So, you are tapping an interesting area but it is at a much more macro
> > level of psychology.  I would rather focus on very simple appraisals
> > that are easy to generate with current knowledge based systems.
>
> Yes, fine.

Bill