Assessing Persuasion in Argumentation through Emotions and Mental States

Argumentative persuasion usually employs one of the three persuasion strategies: Ethos, Pathos or Logos. Several approaches have been proposed to model persuasive agents, however, none of them explored how the choice of a strategy impacts the mental states of the debaters and the argumentation process. We conducted a field experiment with real debaters to assess the impact of the mental engagement and emotions of the participants, as well as of the persuasiveness power of the arguments exchanged during the debate. Our results show that the Pathos strategy is the most effective in terms of mental engagement.