Emotion Modeling

Emotion modeling has been an active area of research for almost two decades now. Yet in spite of the growing and diverse body of work, designing and developing emotion models remains an art, with few standards and systematic guidelines available to guide the design process, and to validate the resulting models. In this introduction I first summarize some of the existing work attempting to establish more systematic approaches to affective modeling, and highlight the specific contributions to this effort discussed in the papers in this volume. I then propose an analytical computational framework that delineates the core affective processes, emotion generation and emotion effects, and defines the abstract computational tasks necessary to implement these. This framework provides both a common vocabulary for describing the computational requirements for affective modeling, and proposes the building blocks necessary for implementing emotion models. As such, it can serve both as a foundation for developing more systematic guidelines for model design, and as a basis for developing modeling tools. I conclude with a summary and a discussion of some open questions and challenges.