Affiliations: Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Department of Artificial Intelligence, De Boelelaan 1081a, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands, E-mail: {tbosse, fle600}@few.vu.nl
Note: [] Corresponding author.
Note: [] A preliminary version of this article appeared in: Proceedings of the Eighth IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology, IAT'08.
Abstract: To endow virtual agents with more believable affective behavior, it is important to provide them not only the capability to generate and regulate their own emotions, but also the ability to reason about the emotion regulation processes of the agents around them. As a step in this direction, this paper introduces a computational model for a Theory of Emotion Regulation (ToER), which combines the notions of Theory of Mind (ToM) and emotion regulation. This model has been implemented and tested using the modeling language LEADSTO, and found to show the expected behaviour. In addition, a virtual environment application has been developed, which is inhabited by agents that are equipped with the model for ToER. A first evaluation indicates that the model indeed enables the virtual agents to show more realistic affective behavior.
Keywords: Virtual agents, Theory of Mind, emotion regulation
