The logical structure of emotions

Abstract

Even though emotions sometimes lead us astray, there is mounting evidence from psychology and neurology that emotions have---on the whole---a positive effect on intelligent decision making and acting. Emotions help both overtly and covertly by focusing a person's attention to what is important and pruning unpromising directions of reasoning. Like humans, artificial agents---such as robots and virtual characters---have to act intelligently under resource constraints. A deep understanding of how human emotions function as innate and learned heuristics can help us in designing more effective artificial agents. Even if one does not want artificial agents to behave emotionally, it will still be useful to make these agents have knowledge of human emotions, so that they can take these into account when interacting or cooperating with humans. In order to incorporate emotions in artificial agents, a bridge must be built from psychological models of human emotions to computer science. This is done in this dissertation by capturing an emotion theory in a formal agent specification language. This formalization both serves as a foundation for the implementation of emotions in artificial agents, and enables us to formally analyze properties of the psychological model, leading to a more precise understanding of the workings of human emotions