# ECR-Chain: Advancing Generative Language Models to Better Emotion-Cause Reasoners through Reasoning Chains

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.10860 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10860/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Audio-language model reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 9 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 May 2024.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Audio-language model reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/audio-language-model-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Large Language Models are not Fair Evaluators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17926/) (2023)
- [Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00923/) (2023)
- [Making Large Language Models Better Reasoners with Step-Aware Verifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02336/) (2022)
- [Active Prompting with Chain-of-Thought for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12246/) (2023)
- [Explanations from Large Language Models Make Small Reasoners Better](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06726/) (2022)
- [Is ChatGPT Equipped with Emotional Dialogue Capabilities?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09582/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [AffectGPT: A New Dataset, Model, and Benchmark for Emotion Understanding with Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.16566/) (2025)
- [Affective Computing in the Era of Large Language Models: A Survey from the NLP Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04638/) (2024)
- [IntentionESC: An Intention-Centered Framework for Enhancing Emotional Support in Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05947/) (2025)
- [MLlm-DR: Towards Explainable Depression Recognition with MultiModal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05591/) (2025)
- [When LLMs Team Up: The Emergence of Collaborative Affective Computing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01698/) (2025)
- [Large Emotional World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.24149/) (2025)
- [Think out Loud: Emotion Deducing Explanation in Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04758/) (2024)
- [S^2tory: Story Spine Distillation for Movie Script Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.03244/) (2026)
- [When Cognitive Graphs Meet LLMs: BDEI Cognitive Pathways for Panic Emotional Arousal Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15121/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Understanding the process of emotion generation is crucial for analyzing the causes behind emotions. Causal Emotion Entailment (CEE), an emotion-understanding task, aims to identify the causal utterances in a conversation that stimulate the emotions expressed in a target utterance. However, current works in CEE mainly focus on modeling semantic and emotional interactions in conversations, neglecting the exploration of the emotion-generation process. This hinders the models from deeply understanding emotions, restricting their ability to produce explainable predictions. In this work, inspired by the emotion generation process of "stimulus-appraisal-emotion" in the cognitive appraisal theory, we introduce a step-by-step reasoning method, Emotion-Cause Reasoning Chain (ECR-Chain), to infer the stimulus from the target emotional expressions in conversations. Specifically, we first introduce the ECR-Chain to ChatGPT via few-shot prompting, which significantly improves its performance on the CEE task. We further propose an automated construction process to utilize ChatGPT in building an ECR-Chain set, which can enhance the reasoning abilities of smaller models through supervised training and assist the Vicuna-7B model in achieving state-of-the-art CEE performance. Moreover, our methods can enable these generative language models to effectively perform emotion-cause reasoning in an explainable manner. Our code, data and more details are at https://github.com/hzp3517/ECR-Chain.