Affective revision

Abstract

Moods and emotions influence human reasoning, most of the time in a positive way. One aspect of reasoning is the revision of beliefs, i.e., how to change a set of beliefs in order to incorporate new information that conflicts with the existing beliefs. We incorporate two influences of affective states on belief maintenance identified by psychologists, in a AI belief revision operation. On one hand, we present an alternative operation to conventional Belief Revision, Affective Revision, that determines the preference between new and old information based on the mood of the agent revising its beliefs. On the other, we show how beliefs can be automatically ordered, in terms of resistance to change, based on (among other aspects) the influence of emotion anticipations on the strength of beliefs. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.