Described herein are methods for identifying situations. The methods receive samples, each comprising a temporal window of token instances to which a user was exposed and an affective response annotation. One embodiment clusters the samples into a plurality of clusters utilizing a distance function that computes a distance between a pair comprising first and second samples. Another embodiment utilizes an Expectation-Maximization approach to assign situation identifiers. And still another embodiment involves training, utilizing the samples, a machine learning-based classifier to assign situation identifiers.