The Architectural Role of Emotion in Cognitive Systems

In this chapter, we will revive an old argument that theories of human emotion can give insight into the design and control of complex cognitive systems. In particular, we claim that appraisal theories of emotion provide essential insight into the influences of emotion over cognition and can help translate such findings into concrete guidance for the design of cognitive systems. Appraisal theory claims that emotion plays a central and functional role in sensing external events, characterizing them as opportunity or threats and recruiting the cognitive, physical and social resources needed to adaptively respond. Further, because it argues for a close association between emotion and cognition, the theoretical claims of appraisal theory can be recast as a requirement specification for how to build a cognitive system. This specification asserts a set of judgments that must be supported in order to correctly interpret and respond to stimuli and provides a unifying framework for integrating these judgments into a coherent physical or social response. This chapter elaborates argument in some detail based on our joint experience in building complex cognitive systems and computational models of emotion.