Modeling Emotions and Other Motivations in Synthetic Agents

We present Cathexis, a distributed, computational model which offers an alternative approach to model the dynamic nature of different affective phenomena, such as emotions, moods and temperaments, and provides a flexible way of modeling their influence on the behavior of synthetic autonomous agents. The model has been implemented as part of an extensible, object-oriented framework which provides enough functionality for agent developers to design emotional agents that can be used in a variety of applications including entertainment (e.g. synthetic agents for interactive drama, video games, etc.), education (e.g. Intelligent Tutoring Systems), and human-computer interfaces.

[1]  P. Johnson-Laird,et al.  Basic emotions, rationality, and folk theory , 1992 .

[2]  Philip R. Cohen,et al.  Emotional influences in memory and thinking: Data and theory , 1982 .

[3]  H. Evans.  The Study of Instinct , 1952 .

[4]  Nico H. Frijda,et al.  Passions: emotions and socially consequential behavior , 1995 .

[5]  S. Tomkins.  The positive affects , 1963 .

[6]  P. Ekman.  An argument for basic emotions , 1992 .

[7]  Bruce Blumberg,et al.  Action-selection in hamsterdam: lessons from ethology , 1994 .

[8]  S. Tomkins.  Illuminating and Stimulating. (Book Reviews: Affect, Imagery, Consciousness. vol. 1, The Positive Affects) , 1963 .

[9]  Andrew Ortony,et al.  The Cognitive Structure of Emotions , 1988 .

[10]  W. S. Reilly,et al.  Believable Social and Emotional Agents. , 1996 .

[11]  Pattie Maes,et al.  Artificial life meets entertainment: lifelike autonomous agents , 1995, CACM.

[12]  G. Reeke.  The society of mind , 1991 .

[13]  Sean A. Spence,et al.  Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain , 1995 .

[14]  Hiroaki Kitano,et al.  A Model for Hormonal Modulation of Learning , 1995, IJCAI.

[15]  G. Arundale.  The Psychology of the Emotions , 1898, Nature.

[16]  C. Elliott.  The affective reasoner: a process model of emotions in a multi-agent system , 1992 .

[17]  Joseph Bates,et al.  The role of emotion in believable agents , 1994, CACM.

[18]  C. Izard,et al.  Four systems for emotion activation: cognitive and noncognitive processes. , 1993, Psychological review.

[19]  Ira J. Roseman,et al.  Appraisals of emotion-eliciting events: Testing a theory of discrete emotions. , 1990 .

[20]  J. Eccles.  The emotional brain. , 1980, Bulletin et memoires de l'Academie royale de medecine de Belgique.

[21]  Pattie Maes,et al.  Designing autonomous agents: Theory and practice from biology to engineering and back , 1990, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[22]  Juan David Velásquez,et al.  Cathexis--a computational model for the generation of emotions and their influence in the behavior of autonomous agents , 1996 .

[23]  Rolf Pfeifer,et al.  Artificial Intelligence Models of Emotion , 1988 .