Variables Influencing the Intensity of Simulated Affective States

An important, yet minimally explored, aspect of emotion simulation is the way in which changes in emotion eliciting situations can give rise to different intensities in the resulting emotion instances. Usin~ the work of Ortony, etal. [Ortony e~ al., 1988J as a guide, we propose a set of emotion inLe~siLy ~ariables to be used in modeling the causes of varying emotion intensity, and discuss their implementation within the coarse-grained simulation environment of the Affective Reasoner [Elliott, 1992], a program that reasons about emotion. These variables, our motivation for selecting them, and portions of two functions which use them in computing simulated emotion intensities, are presented in this paper.