Endowing Emotional Agents with Coping Strategies: From Emotions to Emotional Behaviour

Emotion takes an increasingly important place in the design of intelligent virtual agents. Designers of emotional agents build on theories from cognitive psychology, that describe the cognitive functioning of emotions with two indivisible processes [1,2]: the

appraisal

process triggers emotions, in particular intense negative emotions to point out threatening stimuli, and the

coping

process modifies the behaviour to manage these stimuli. Nevertheless, among the existing emotional agents, a lot express emotions triggered by an appraisal process [3] but few have a coping process allowing their emotions to impact their behaviour [4,5,6]. In previous work [7] we provided a formalization of Ortony et al.’s appraisal process [8] in a BDI logic,

et al.’s

a logic of mental attitudes. The next step is to formalize the coping process in the same framework. Our aim here is to provide the theoretical basis of an agent architecture rather than an implementation. We only give here an overview of our framework (

cf

. [9,10] for more details).