Mixed agent/social dynamics for emotion computation

Julien Saunier, Hazaël Jones

Abstract:

Affective computing is the study and development of systems and devices that can recognise, interpret, process, and simulate human affects. In this context, computational modelling of emotion is a major challenge in order to design believable virtual humans. This factor has an impact on both the individual behaviour and the collective one. Recently, researchers have shown an increased interest in the emotion contagion phenomenon in order to model emerging group behaviour.
Stemming from works on multi-agent systems environments, we propose an architecture to manage both internal and external emotion dynamics. Emotions evolve in function of three influences: punctual events, temporal dynamics and external influences. In an embodied agent approach, the first is the responsibility of the agent’s mind, the second of the agent’s body, and the third of the environment. This functional architecture is then adapted to a multi-agent architecture, adding a control responsibility to the agent body. Finally, we show the results of several experiments to examine the properties of the architecture and its efficiency by comparing it to a full agent approach.