Chapter 2 Social Emotions. A Challenge for Sentiment Analysis and User Models Francesca D’Errico and Isabella Poggi Abstract The work overviews the theoretical models of emotions mainly used by computer scientists in the area of user modeling and sentiment analysis. Central in this regard are the dimensional models in which the body side is crucial, and the cognitive ones in which the evaluation processes give rise to emotions. Special attention is devoted to a socio-cognitive model of emotions in terms of goals and beliefs, focusing on social emotions, both related to image (admiration, bitterness, enthusiasm) and to self-image (pride, shame). Nature, function, and typical body signals of these emotions are overviewed. 2.1 Introduction In recent years, we have witnessed a fruitful dialog between psychosocial and com- puter sciences, within the field of artificial intelligence, passing from the planning of “systems that act like humans” to “systems that think like humans” [88]. The reason is clearly due to progress in both fields and to the integration of theoretical psychological models with technologies, increasingly able to apply these models to their programming languages. One more merit of this is the reciprocal feedback: theoretical models risk to remain abstract when not considered from a computational point of view, while computational ones are not sufficiently grounded if only tailored on the machine. Further, the computational point of view forces psychologists to test models of emotions in a temporal dynamics; this methodological constraint enriches models of emotions with “virtual ecology”, i.e., a retry in time and space of things that would not be ethically provable in the laboratory [37]. Gratch and F. D’Errico (B ) Psychology Faculty Roma, Uninettuno University, Rome, Italy e-mail: f.derrico@uninettunouniversity.net I. Poggi Dipartimento di Filosofia Comunicazione Spettacolo, Roma Tre University, Roma, Italy e-mail: isabella.poggi@uniroma3.it © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 M. Tkalˇ ciˇ c et al. (eds.), Emotions and Personality in Personalized Services, Human–Computer Interaction Series, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-31413-6_2 13