Variables Influencing the Intensity of Simulated Affective States
Clark Elliott, Greg J. Siegle · 1993
An important, yet minimally explored, aspect of emotion simulation is the way in which changes in emotion eliciting situations can give rise to different intensities in the resulting emotion instances. Using the work of Ortony, et al. [ Ortony et al., 1988 ] as a guide, we propose a set of emotion intensity variables to be used in modeling the causes of varying emotion intensity, and discuss their implementation within the coarse-grained simulation environment of the Affective Reasoner [ Elliott, 1992 ] , a program that reasons about emotion. These variables, our motivation for selecting them, and portions of two functions which use them in computing simulated emotion intensities, are presented in this paper. Motivation Affect plays an important role in the way humans respond to situations. The affective processes may, from the perspective of a reasoning system, be viewed as a heuristic mechanism for efficiently assessing one's circumstances and acting upon them [ Oatley, 1987 ] . An...