Emotional Computer: Design Challenges and Opportunities

Extensive studies established the existence of a close interaction between emotion and cognition with remarkable influence of the emotion on all sorts of cognitive process. Consequently, technologies that emulate human intelligent behavior cannot be thought completely intelligent without incorporating interference of emotional component in the rational reasoning processes. Recently, several researchers have been started working in the field of emotion modeling to cater the need of interactive computer applications that demand human-like interaction with the computer. However, due to the absence of structured guidelines, the most challenging task for the researcher is to understand and select the most appropriate definitions, theories and processes governing the human psychology to design the intended model. The objective of the present article is to review the background scenario and necessary studies for designing emotion model for a computer machine so that it could generate appropriate synthetic emotions while interacting with the external environmental factors.