Modeling the Experience of Emotion

Abstract

Affective computing has proven to be a viable field of research comprised of a large number of multidisciplinary researchers, resulting in work that is widely published. The majority of this work consists of emotion recognition technology, computational modeling of causal factors of emotion and emotion expression in virtual characters and robots. A smaller part is concerned with modeling the effects of emotion on cognition and behavior, formal modeling of cognitive appraisal theory and models of emergent emotions. Part of the motivation for affective computing as a field is to better understand emotion through computational modeling. In psychology, a critical and neglected aspect of having emotions is the experience of emotion: what does the content of an emotional episode look like, how does this content change over time, and when do we call the episode emotional. Few modeling efforts in affective computing have these topics as a primary focus. The launch of a journal on synthetic emotions should motivate research initiatives in this direction, and this research should have a measurable impact on emotion research in psychology. In this article, I show that a good way to do so is to investigate the psychological core of what an emotion is: an experience. I present ideas on how computational modeling of emotion can help to better understand the experience of motion, and provide evidence that several computational models of emotion already address the issue.

Invited Commentaries

“…The lack of guidelines and the sharing of bestpractices as well as failures are some of those challenges. These challenges are very relevant when one is interested in the development of computational models of emotion that are focused on being applied in particular domain, for example games, virtual avatars or social robots (Broekens, 2010). As Hudlicka shows, choices and assumptions have to be made when developing a computational model based on, e.g., an appraisal theory.…”

“…First, the topic of investigation has to be meaningful to emotion psychologists. This would include topics related to emotion processing in humans (e.g., the influence of arousal on attention, a detailed process of fear appraisal, the structure of the experience of emotion, Broekens, 2010), but exclude topics related to simulation specifics irrelevant to or too generic for emotion processing (e.g., the system is build in Java, the emotion architecture has a black box called "emotion" that influences another black box called "cognition"). This means that a clear hypothesis is needed about what the computational model is supposed to investigate.…”

Emotional Models

“…Lately,severeattentionwasdirectedtowardthestudyofemotionsespeciallybecauseofthe appearance of "Affective Computing" term (Broekens, 2010). AC is trend to have an emotional human-computerinteractioninwhichthecomputerorthedevicewillbeabletodetectandrespond totheend-user'semotionswhichfinallyleadstoamoreuseful,enjoyableandspecialexperiencefor theuser (Zohora,2016) (Tian,2018).Forasuccessfulaffectivecomputing,therearethreeprocesses tobedone,namelyemotionrecognition,emotionelicitationandtheemotionalbehaviorgeneration.…”

Challenges in Computational Modeling of Affective Processes

“…This question is addressed by computational modeling of the relation between emotion, mood, personality, attitude, etc. These questions can be approached from an applied and a theoretical perspective [4]. The applied perspective focuses on using the computational model in some concrete form, for example as a model that drives the generation of emotions in an intelligent virtual character.…”

“…The theoretical perspective focuses on a better understanding of affective processes per se through the use of computational modeling, for example, a model that implements and tests hypotheses about when, where and how fear and sadness arise. The applied and theoretical perspectives are by no means mutually exclusive [4], quite the contrary, as the application of such models also involves testing them, potentially shedding light on the underlying affective processes. However, emphasizing one of these two perspectives does focus the research involved in developing the model, and up to this date most computational models of affective processes have a primarily applied goal.…”