Page 162 - Socially Intelligent Agents Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots

Pedagogical Soap 145

Emotional
Appraisal

Physical
Focus
Events Behavior
Prob.
Solving
(Coping)
Dialog

Figure 17.2. Agent Architecture.

it intends to communicate, which may include an intent to project an asso-
ciated emotion. This communication may be suggestive of certain nonverbal
behavior for the agent’s face, arms, hands etc. However, the agent’s emotional
state derived from emotional appraisal may suggest quite different behaviors.
Physical focus mediates this contention.
A simple example demonstrates how some of these pathways work. Gina
may ask Carmen why her daughter is having temper tantrums. Feeling anx-
ious about being judged a bad mother, Carmen copes (problem solving) by
dismissing the significance of the tantrums (dialog model): “She is just be-
ing babyish, she wants attention.” Based on Carmen’s dialog and emotional
state, physical focus selects relevant behaviors (e.g., fidgeting with her hands).
Her dialog also feeds back to emotional appraisal. She may now feel guilty
for “de-humanizing” her child, may physically display that feeling (physical
focus) and then go on to openly blame herself. Carmen can go through this se-
quence of interactions solely based on the flux in her emotional reaction to her
own behavior. Gina, meanwhile, will emotionally appraise Carmen’s seeming
callousness and briefly reveal shock (e.g., by raised eyebrows), but that behav-
ior may quickly be overridden if her dialog model decides to project sympathy.
Emotional appraisal plays a key role in shaping how the agents interact and
how the user interacts with Carmen. The appraisal model draws on the re-
search of Richard Lazarus (1991). In the Lazarus model, emotions flow out of
cognitive appraisal and management of the person-environment relationship.
Appraisal of events in terms of their significance to the individual leads to emo-
tions and tendencies to cope in certain ways. The appraisal process is broken
into two classes. Primary appraisal establishes an event’s relevance. Secondary
appraisal addresses the options available to the agent for coping with the event.
One of the key steps in primary appraisal is to determine an individual’s ego
involvement: how an event impacts the agent’s collection of individual com-