Narrative Scenarios as a Testbed for Moral Agents

An Emotional Agent for Moral Impairment Rehabilitation in TBI Patients

“…In this study, both tests described in Battaglino and Damiano ( 2014a ) were used to explore emotion understanding in narrative in TBI patients. In previous studies, the expectations of neurologically intact individuals on characters' behavior and emotions have been demonstrated to match predictions made by modeling characters as MEA agents (Battaglino and Damiano, 2014a , b ). Therefore, this study could leverage such testing tools to compare MEA agents' behavior and emotions with TBI participants' expectations and predictions.…”

“…The results, discussed in Battaglino and Damiano ( 2014a , b ), showed that the expectations of the testers matched the predictions of the model: for the Actor Studio, the participants attributed to the character the course of behavior and the emotions predicted by the model (Battaglino and Damiano, 2014a ); for the Audience Studio, the emotional states including moral emotions were evaluated as more complete and believable (Battaglino and Damiano, 2014a , b ).…”

“…After receiving a description of the character's goals and values, each participant was asked to choose the most suitable option for the character. The Audience Studio (Battaglino and Damiano, 2014b) test was aimed at validating the interplay of values and emotions in the agent: all participants were exposed to the same characters' behavior with two different conditions-with and without moral emotions-and had to assess their adequacy, as if they were assessing the performance of actors interpreting the characters. The test included 4 narrative scenarios (see Appendix 1.2) where the main characters were implemented by the MEA agent (Battaglino et al, 2013;Cristina, 2015).…”

“…In order to validate the MEA model, Battaglino and Damiano compared the behavior and the emotions generated by the MEA agent with the predictions of human participants in a set of narrative scenarios (Battaglino and Damiano, 2014a , b ). Following the suggestions of a drama expert, the scenarios for both experiments were taken from well-known literary works, thus lifting the experiment design from the task of inventing new and potentially controversial narrative situations.…”