Modelling human emotion in interactive environments: Physiological ensemble and grounded approaches for synthetic agents

Abstract

With the rising research in emotionally believable agents, several advances in agent technology have been made, ranging from interactive virtual agents to emotional mechanism simulations and emotional agent architectures. However, creating an emotionally believable agent capable of emotional thought is still largely out of reach. It has been proposed that being able to accurately model human emotion would allow agents to mimic human behaviour while these models are studied to create more accurate theoretical models. In light of these challenges, we present a general method for human emotional state modelling in interactive environments. The proposed method employs a three-layered classification process to model the arousal and valence (i.e., hedonic) emotional components, based on four selected psychophysiological metrics. Additionally, we also developed a simplified version of our system for use in real-time systems and low-fidelity applications. The modelled emotional states by both approaches compared favourably with a manual approach following the current best practices reported in the literature while also improving on its predictive ability. The obtained results indicate we are able to accurately predict human emotional states, both in offline and online scenarios with varying levels of granularity; thus, providing a transversal method for modelling and reproducing human emotional profiles.