When Cognitive Graphs Meet LLMs: BDEI Cognitive Pathways for Panic Emotional Arousal Prediction

Abstract

Predicting the timing of individual and collective panic emotional arousal before manifestation is essential for timely emergency intervention. Existing methods incorporate cognitive elements but none of them model emotion in the generative direction of the arousal process, leaving arousal timing undetermined. We argue that grounding prediction in appraisal emotion theory is necessary because it models this process explicitly in its natural generative direction, but three problems must be solved. (1) Appraisal theory posits that emotion arises from simultaneous evaluation across multiple threat dimensions, yet no prior work fuses these inputs into risk perception; (2) Existing models are trained in the opposite, behavior-bridged direction, recovering emotion merely as a post-hoc correlate of behavior; (3) Approaches that adopt LLMs as the primary decision-maker yet overlook the fragility and hallucination-proneness of their outputs. We introduce PanicCognitivePath (PCP) to address all three. A Psychological Safety Distance (PSD) model, grounded in psychological distance theory, maps four-domain signals (physical, social, cognitive, and informational) into a unified risk metric that gates entry to cognitive reasoning. An explicit Emotion node grounded in appraisal emotion theory is introduced into BDI, forming a novel Belief-Desire-Emotion-Intention (BDEI) pathway that couples threat appraisal directly to emotional arousal. Inverting the conventional LLM-as-decision-maker paradigm, PCP confines the LLM to parameter estimation for the Belief-to-Desire transition, restricting hallucinations to a single step and curbing their accumulation across steps. Experiments on Hurricane Sandy show PCP improves individual prediction accuracy by 10.68% over baselines, reduces peak count error to 7.07%.