A social and emotional model for obtaining believable emergent behaviors

Abstract

This paper attempts to define an emotional model for virtual agents that behave autonomously in social worlds. We adopt shallow modeling based on the decomposition of the emotional state in two qualities: valence (pleasantness or hedonic value) and arousal (bodily activation) and, also, for the agent personality based on the five factors model (openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism). The proposed model aims to endow agents with a satisfactory emotional state achieved through the social actions, i.e. the development of social abilities. Psychology characterizes these social abilities for: using the language as a tool (verbal and nonverbal communication), being learned, producing reciprocal reward among the individuals involved in the communication and for depending on the individual features. We have implemented our model in the framework of a computer game, AI-live, to show its validity.