The use of emotions to create believable agents in a virtual environment

ABSTRACT

In the past emotions have been dismissed as a distraction to the logical, scientific thought process. More recently however, the importance of emotion in human-like intelligence and behaviour has been identified. This project aims at exploring this aspect of Artificial Intelligence by modeling the ability to display emotions in autonomous software agents within the constraints of a virtual environment. The motivation behind this is to determine whether the behaviour of these agents will cause the human participant to interact with the agent as if interacting with other humans. We have created an Agent-Cocktail Party World for this purpose and an Avatar-Cocktail Party World for the purpose of studying the psychological phenomenon of Ostracism. Our results show that the addition of an emotion-based intelligent component was able to make a statistically significant difference to the experimental condition by creating a more realistic environment in which to simulate the Punitive Ostracism condition.

REFERENCES

• 1: Bailenson, J., Beall, A., Blascovich, J., Raimundo, M. & Weishbush, M. (2000) Intelligent agents who wear your face: User's reactions to the virtual self, Technical Report, Center for the Virtual Environment and Behaviors, Department of Psychology, University of California, Santa Barbara.
• 2: Joseph Bates, The role of emotion in believable agents, Communications of the ACM, v.37 n.7, p.122-125, July 1994 [doi>10.1145/176789.176803]
• 3: Blascovich, J. (2001), Immersive Virtual Environment Technology as a tool for Psychological Science, Psychological Science Agenda, November/December issue.
• 4: Canamero, D. (1997), Designing emotions for activity selection, Technical Report, Lego Lab, Department of Computer Science, University of Arhus Aabogade, Denmark 34 DK-8200.
• 5: J. Cassell , H. Vilhjálmsson, Fully Embodied Conversational Avatars: Making Communicative Behaviors Autonomous, Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, v.2 n.1, p.45-64, March 1999 [doi>10.1023/A:1010027123541 ]
• 6: Ekman, P. (1993), Facial Expression and Emotion, 1992 Award Address, American Psychologist, April Vol48, No4, 384--392
• 7: Ekman, P. (1997) Should we call it expression or communication? Innovations in Social Science Research, Vol 10, No5 pp 333--344.
• 8: Ekman, P. (1999a) Basic Emotions. In: Dalgleish & Power (Eds) Handbook of Cognition and Emotions, chapter 3. Wiley & Sons, Sussex, UK.
• 9: Ekman, P. (1999b) Facial Expression. In: Dalgleish & Power (Eds) Handbook of Cognition and Emotions, chapter 3. Wiley & Sons, Sussex, UK.
• 10: Gruter, M. & Masters, R. (eds). (1986) Ostracism: A social and biological phenomenon. Ethnology and Sociobiology, 7, 149--395.
• 11: Loomis, J., Blascovich, J. & Beall, A. (1999), Immersive Virtual Environment Technology as a basic research tool in psychology. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments & Computer, 31(4) 557--564.
• 12: Eugénio Oliveira , Luís Sarmento, Emotional advantage for adaptability and autonomy, Proceedings of the second international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems, July 14-18, 2003, Melbourne, Australia [doi>10.1145/860575.860625]
• 13: Rousseau, D. & Hayes-Roth, B. (1997), Interacting with Personality-rich Characters, Technical Report, Knowledge Systems Laboratory, KSL 97-06.
• 14: Williams, K. (2001), Ostracism- the Power of silence, Salovey (Ed) Emotions and Social Behavior series, Guilford Press.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.6 SIMULATION AND MODELING
      I.6.7 Simulation Support Systems
          Subjects: Environments

Additional Classification:
  J. Computer Applications
  J.4 SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
      Subjects: Psychology

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation, Human Factors, Security

Keywords:
emotion-based agent architecture, ostracism, psychology, virtual reality