Modeling students’ emotions from cognitive appraisal in educational games

We present a probabilistic model that assesses student emotional reaction during interaction with an educational game. Following a well-known cognitive theory of emotions (the OCC theory), the model predicts a student’s emotional state by assessing the student’s appraisal of her interaction with the game, in light of the student’s goals and personality. We illustrate how the model relies on a Dynamic Decision Network that is based on both the OCC theory and observations from two user studies.