The mental ingredients of Bitterness

In view of multimodal interfaces capable of a detailed representation of the User’s possible emotions, the paper analyses bitterness in terms of its mental ingredients, the beliefs and goals represented in the mind of a person when feeling an emotion. Bitterness is a negative emotion in between anger and sadness: like anger, it is caused by a sense of injustice, but also entails a sense of impotence which makes it similar to sadness. Often caused by betrayal, it comes from the disappointment of an expectation from oneself or anothers with whom one is affectively involved, or from a disproportion between commitment and actual results. The ingredients found in a pilot study were tested through qualitative analysis of a further questionnaire, which confirmed the ingredients hypothesized, further revealing the different nature of bitterness across ages and across types of work.