Emotional and non emotional presuasion

A relevant issue in the domain of natural argumentation and persuasion is the interaction (synergic or conflicting) between "rational" or "cognitive" modes of persuasion and "irrational" or "emotional" ones. This work provides a model of general persuasion and emotional persuasion. We examine two basic modes for appealing to emotions, arguing that emotional persuasion does not necessarily coincide with irrational persuasion, and showing how the appeal to emotions is grounded on the strict and manifold relationship between emotions and goals, which is, so to say, "exploited" by a persuader. We describe various persuasion strategies, propose a method to formalize and represent them as oriented graphs, and show how emotional and non-emotional strategies (and also emotional and non-emotional components in the same strategy) may interact with and strengthen each other. Finally, we address the role of uncertainty in persuasion strategies and show how it can be represented in persuasion graphs