Toward Effective Emotional Intelligence Simulation Essay -- Psychology

The ability to understand the emotions of others is critical for successful interactions among humans (Dias & Paiva, 2009; Kazemifard, Ghasem-Aghaee, & Ãâ€"ren, 2010). The psychological theory of emotional intelligence (EI) proposes four categories of relevant abilities (Mayer & Salovey, 1997): (1) identifying emotions, (2) understanding emotions, (3) using emotions in thought processes, and (4) managing emotions. This research focuses on emotion understanding, the cognitive activity of making inferences using emotional knowledge about why an agent is in an emotional state (e.g., unfair treatment makes an individual angry) and which actions are associated with the emotional state (e.g., an angry individual attacks others). Such emotion understanding in humans develops through their experiences with other agents. How might such learning in humans inform a model to enable artificial emotional agents to develop emotion understanding? Our approach to answering this question proposes a model of emotion understanding that combines psychological theories of episodic and semantic memory with ...