Normative Emotional Agents: A Viewpoint Paper

Abstract

Human social relationships imply conforming to the norms, behaviors and cultural values of the society, but also socialization of emotions, to learn how to interpret and show them. In multiagent systems, much progress has been made in the analysis and interpretation of both emotions and norms. Nonetheless, the relationship between emotions and norms has hardly been considered and most normative agents do not consider emotions, or vice-versa. In this article, we provide an overview of relevant aspects within the area of normative agents and emotional agents. First we focus on the concept of norm, the different types of norms, its life cycle and a review of multiagent normative systems. Secondly, we present the most relevant theories of emotions, the life cycle of an agent's emotions, and how emotions have been included through computational models in multiagent systems. Next, we present an analysis of proposals that integrate emotions and norms in multiagent systems. From this analysis, four relationships are detected between norms and emotions, which we analyze in detail and discuss how these relationships have been tackled in the reviewed proposals. Finally, we present a proposal for an abstract architecture of a Normative Emotional Agent that covers these four norm-emotion relationships.

Noe: Norms Emergence and Robustness Based on Emotions in Multiagent Systems

“…Argente et al [4] propose an abstract normative emotional agent architecture, an extension of Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) architecture, which combines emotional, normative, and BDI component. Argente Bourgais et al [5] present an agent architecture that integrates cognition, emotions, emotion contagion, personality, norms, and social relations to simulate humans and ensure explainable behaviors.…”

“…Noe integrates the BDI architecture [7] with a normative model [23,12,4] and an emotional model [3,17]. A Noe agent assesses the environment, including other agents' explicit emotions, its cognitive mental states, and infer possible outcomes to make a decision.…”

“…The decision-making process for humans or agents involves evaluating possible consequences of available actions and choosing the action that maximizes the expected utility [11]. Without considering emotions or other affective characteristics, such as personality or mood, some compliance seems irrational [4]. Humans' compliance does show hints on rational planning over their objectives [16].…”

“…At the cultural level, emotions facilitate cultural identities and help individuals learn the norms and the values of their culture [16]. Based on this understanding of emotions and norms, we propose an agent architecture that integrates the BDI architecture [7] with a normative model [4,27] and emotional model [3,17].…”

“…To address RQ emotion , we refine the abstract normative emotional agent architecture [4] and investigate the interplay of norms and emotions. We propose a framework Noe based on BDI architecture [7], norm life-cycle [23,12,4], and emotion life-cycle [3,17]. To evaluate Noe, we design a simulation experiment with various agent societies.…”