Modeling Emotions And Other Motivations In Synthetic Agents

Abstract

We present Cathexis, a distributed, computational model which offers an alternative approach to model the dynamic nature of different affective phenomena, such as emotions, moods and temperaments, and provides a flexible way of modeling their influence on the behavior of synthetic autonomous agents. The model has been implemented as part of an extensible, object-oriented framework which provides enough functionality for agent developers to design emotional agents that can be used in a variety of applications including entertainment (e.g. synthetic agents for interactive drama, video games, etc.), education (e.g. Intelligent Tutoring Systems), and human-computer interfaces.