Hybrid Emotionally Aware Mediated Multiagency

Emotions influence our everyday lives, guiding and misguiding us. They lead us to happiness and love, but also to irrational acts. Artificial intelligence aims at constructing agents that can emulate thinking processes, but artificial life still lacks emotions and all the consequences that come from them. This work introduces an emotionally aware framework geared towards multi-agent societies. Basing our model on the shoulders of solid foundations created by pioneers who first explored the coupling of emotions and agency, we extend their ideas to include inter-agent interaction and virtual genetics as key components of an agent’s emotive state. We also introduce possible future applications of this framework in consumer products as well as research endeavors. INTRODUCTION We as human beings are influenced by many factors as we carry out our daily activities and routines. Emotions in particular play an important role that often provokes biased decisions. Emotion as it influences one’s behavior can do so in erratic and unpredictable ways with variations between individuals and circumstances. The unpredictability of emotion based responses can lead to many variations of interaction. This would certainly apply to interactions between humans, but also to interactions between humans and environmental artifacts and also to human-agent interactions. Decisions biased by a particular emotional state can produce erratic, impulsive or risky decision making behaviors within a given context (Loewenstein, Weber, Hsee, & Welch, 2001). If these states can cause a person to act in a potentially destructive fashion we should investigate ways to limit these Giovanni Vincenti Gruppo Vincenti, Italy James Braman Towson University, USA Hybrid Emotionally Aware Mediated Multiagency DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-818-7.ch5.8