Investigating the impact of emotion on temporal orientation in a deep multitask setting

Human Temporal orientation refers to a cognitive operation that shows how an individual emphasizes past, present, and future. How individuals differ in their temporal orientation and what reasons lead them to do so can show their future goal-setting, health, and education.

Studies in psychology and social science reveal that temporal orientation has a huge impact on our behavior, interpersonal relation, emotion, health, attitudes, educational achievements, sexual behavior, sleep and dreaming patterns, academic goal setting, risk-setting, etc.

Previous psychological studies also revealed that human temporal orientation can be associated with other attributes such as age, education, gender, happiness, anger, depression, anxiety, and aggression.

Theoretical research in psychology shows that one’s emotional state can influence his/her temporal orientation. Researchers hypothesize that measuring human temporal orientation can benefit from concurrent learning of emotion.

To test this hypothesis, they propose a deep learning-based multi-task framework where they concurrently learn a unified model for temporal orientation (their primary task) and emotion analysis (secondary task) using tweets.

Their multi-task framework takes users’ tweets as input and produces three temporal orientation labels (past, present, or future) and four emotion labels (joy, sadness, anger, or fear) with intensity values as outputs.

The classified tweets are then grouped for each user to obtain the user-level temporal orientation and emotion. Finally, they investigate the associations between the users’ temporal orientation and their emotional state. Their analysis reveals that joy and anger are correlated to future orientation while sadness and fear are correlated to past orientation.

Published: 11 January 2022

source:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-04331-3

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-04331-3