Modeling Social Emotions in Intelligent Agents Based on the Mental State Formalism

Emotional intelligence is the key for acceptance of intelligent agents by humans as equal partners, e.g., in ad hoc teams. At the same time, its existing implementations in intelligent agents are mostly limited to basic affects. Currently, there is no consensus in the understanding of complex and social emotions at the level of functional and computational models. The approach of this work is based on the mental state formalism, originally developed as a part of the cognitive architecture GMU BICA and recently extended to include affective building blocks (A.V. Samsonovich, AAAI Technical Report WS-12-06: 109-116, 2012). In the present work, complex social emotions like humor, jealousy, compassion, shame, pride, etc. are identified as emergent patterns of appraisals represented by schemas, that capture the cognitive nature of these emotions and enable their modeling. A general model of complex emotions and emotional relationships is constructed that can be validated by simulations of emotionally biased interactions and emergent relationships in small groups of agents. The framework will be useful in cognitive architectures for designing human-like-intelligent social agents possessing a sense of humor and other human-like emotionally intelligent capabilities.