The affective reasoner: a process model of emotions in a multi-agent system

The problem we have addressed in this dissertation is that of designing a pragmatic and rich computer representation of emotions that is at least congenial with psychological theory. Our solution has focused on implementing a platform for reasoning about emotions that supports the testing of such theories. In the platform we model a multi-agent world and give simple affective life to agents in the form of rudimentary emotions and emotion-induced actions. In addition the agents are able to reason about emotion episodes that take place in one another's lives. The implementation includes representations for twenty-four emotion types (based on the work Ortony et al., 1988) and 1400 emotion-induced actions. Agents have rudimentary personalities, including an interpretive component which causes them to construe the world in idiosyncratic ways leading to emotional states, and an expressive component which give agents a unique profile for manifesting their emotions. Agents keep internal models of the concerns of other agents which allow them to explain the emotional episodes of other agents by classifying them as instances in which one or more of the twenty-four emotion types arise. The implementation is simulation-based. It has been run with up to forty agents at a time. Situations arise in the modeled world, agents respond to some of these in their own unique, emotional, ways. Emotion-induced actions are generated which may be placed back in the simulation queue and further perturb the system. Other agents observe and explain the situations using both strong-theory reasoning based on a set of emotion rules, and weak-theory reasoning using a case-based heuristic classification system.