A formal model of emotion-based action tendency for intelligent agents

Abstract

Although several formal models of emotions for intelligent agents have recently been proposed, such models often do not formally specify how emotions influence the behavior of an agent. In psychological literature, emotions are often viewed as heuristics that give an individual the tendency to perform particular actions. In this paper, we take an existing formalization of how emotions come about in intelligent agents and extend this with a formalization of action tendencies. The resulting model specifies how the emotions of an agent determine a set of actions from which it can select one to perform. We show that the presented model of how emotions influence behavior is intuitive and discuss interesting properties of the model. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.