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

Emotion takes an increasingly important place in the design of intelligent virtual agents for various applications. To design such emotional agents it is important to build on psychological research that has already explored the functioning of emotions for a long time. Cognitive psychology agrees on a process of appraisal responsible for the triggering of emotions, complemented by a process of coping that modifies the behaviour to manage negative emotions. Nevertheless, among the existing emotional agents, a lot express their emotions but few have a real emotional behaviour impacted by their emotions. In previous work we have already formalized the appraisal process in a BDI framework. In this paper we thus want to extend this BDI framework to formalize the coping strategies that an emotional agent could use. Our aim here is not to propose an agent architecture or implementation, but rather to provide their theoretical basis.