Anatomy of a Feeling: Narrating Embodied Emotions via Large Vision-Language Models

Abstract: The embodiment of emotional reactions from body parts contains rich information about our affective experiences. We propose a framework that utilizes state-of-the-art large vision-LLMs (LVLMs) to generate Embodied LVLM Emotion Narratives (ELENA). These are well-defined, multi-layered text outputs, primarily comprising descriptions that focus on the salient body parts involved in emotional reactions. We also employ attention maps and observe that contemporary models exhibit a persistent bias towards the facial region. Despite this limitation, we observe that our employed framework can effectively recognize embodied emotions in face-masked images, outperforming baselines without any fine-tuning. ELENA opens a new trajectory for embodied emotion analysis across the modality of vision and enriches modeling in an affect-aware setting.