Emotional appraisal of moral dilemma in characters

Abstract

In the narrative realm, emotions in general, and moral emotions in particular, play an important role in conveying moral values to the audience. A paradigmatic case is given by the occurrence of moral dilemmas in stories, where the character must trade off options that cannot be reconciled, each related with a certain moral value. In this paper, we propose a model of the appraisal of moral emotions, and describe an agent architecture that reacts to the occurrence of a moral dilemma with the appropriate emotions. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.