Understanding emotions: some themes and material

Literature

• Rosalind Pickard (1998): Affective Computing. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

• Jennifer M. Jenkins, Keith Oatley and Nancy L. Stein (eds.) (1998): Human Emotions: A Reader. Blackwell, Malden, MA.

• Aapo Hyvärinen and Timo Honkela (1999): Emotional Disorders in Autonomous Agents? Advances in Artificial Life, Proc. of ECAL'99, Springer, pp. 350-354.

Summary of themes in Pickard'98

Background

• physical vs cognitive

• physical aspect of emotion: scentic modulation
  • facial expression
  • voice intonation
  • gestures, movement
  • posture
  • pupilary dilation
  • respiration
  • heart rate
  • temperature
  • electrodermal response, perspiration
  • muscle action potentials
  • blood pressure

• emotional state -> expression : complications
  • intensity of the emotion
  • type of emotion
  • how was the state induces (by imagination, being in the situation)
  • social display rules

• Damasio: primary vs secondary emotions

• emotions vs creativity : positive correlation (emotional fluidity, mood disorders)

• will and emotion control separate paths: example of paralysed person smiling (p. 42)

Affective computers

• Recognition of human emotions
  • input
  • pattern recognition
  • reasoning (e.g. taking into account the context)
  • learning
  • bias (potential "emotional state" of the computer)
  • output

• Criteria for a system to have emotions
  1. Emergent emotions and emergent behavior
  2. Fast primary emotions
  3. Cognitively generated emotions
  4. Emotional experience
     • cognitive awareness of the emotion
     • physiological awareness
     • subjective experience
  5. Body-mind interactions

• Emotional intelligence
  1. Recognition and expression of emotions
  2. Regulating emotions
  3. Utilizing emotions

  -> In self / In others

• Scope of affective computing
  1. What is the relevant set of emotions for an application?
  2. How can these best be recognitzed/expressed/developed?
  3. How should the computer respond to the user given this information?

• Applications
  • affective mirror
  • enhanced emoticons
  • text to speech (table p. 179)
  • helping autistic persons
  • frustration feedback
  • detecting stress and learning to reduce it
  • affective space (with relation to conceptual space)

• Problems
  • accuracy?
  • privacy
  • control
  • unwarranted behavior of emotional systems

• Asimov 1976: The three laws of robots
  1. A computer may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
  2. A computer must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the first law.
  3. A computer must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the first or second law.

• Models for Affective Behavior
  (see p. 189, 197, poker-playing agents, p. 199, 201, categorisations p. 205, 207)