Emotions in rational decision making

Abstract

Emotions play an important role in human decision making. This often has a beneficial effect, and so it is desirable to explore whether emotions can also play a role in agent decision making. This paper builds on several pieces of earlier work which resulted in a formalization of a model of emotions. We show how, in particular, the emotions of gratitude and displeasure and related emotions can be beneficially integrated into a model of decision making. The model of decision making used is based on a notion of choosing between competing justifications according to the agent's preferences over the social values promoted by the available actions. Emotions of gratitude and displeasure are generated according to whether other agents relevant to the situation support or frustrate the agent's goals and values, and the emotional attitude towards the other agents then influences the ranking of these values, and so affects future choices. The paper summarizes the previous work on which we build, describes the decision making model we use, and explains how emotions are generated and used within that model. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010.