Motivations behind modeling emotional agents: Whose emotion does your robot have?

A communality between research in Artificial Intelligence and Synthetic Emotion is that it seems in both cases to be rather difficult to give an acceptable definition of the naturally occurring counterpart. One could speculate whether this is due to the multiplicity of the nature of both phenomena or due to a categorical misconception. In this paper I try to briefly outline a number of different motivations for modeling emotions, and to relate those motivations to two different principal design approaches for computational models of emotion. From these two aspects, together with our current assumptions about mechanisms underlying human emotions, I conclude with some speculations about adaptation in affective systems, and some implications of the notion of grounding emotions in adaptive systems.