Modeling Primary and Secondary Emotions for a Believable Communication Agent

The integration of emotion and cognition in cognitive architectures for embodied agents is a problem of increasing importance. In this paper, we describe how two separate modules for these tasks, as we employ them in our virtual human Max, can give rise to secondary emotions such as frustration and relief. The BDI-based cognitive module is responsible for appraisal as well as reappraisal of elicited emotions that our conversational agent Max becomes aware of. The emotion dynamics simulation system is driven by the valence information of every emotion and assures a general consistency of the simulated emotions over time by dynamically providing an awareness likelihood for every emotion.