Computational modeling of emotions

With the advance of virtual reality and social robotics computer scientists became increasingly interested in modeling inherently human, interpersonal states and processes. The quest of constructing machines that behave appropriately in direct human interaction affords to integrate social competence, which in turn includes a robot's ability to deal with such soft concepts as ``emotions.''

After a short motivation I give an overview of a selection of the many theories that emotion psychology has to offer. In particular, one possible distinction of three classes of emotions is being motivated, namely that of primary, secondary, and social emotions. These classes serve as basis for the the introduction of ``WASABI'', a computational model of emotions, in which only the first two classes can be represented so far. Thus, in the end it is discussed, how dynamic epistemic logic might be used as basis for the additional integration of social emotions such as ``embarrassment'', ``shame'', or ``guilt.''

The ideas concerning the connection between dynamic epistemic logic and social emotions are joint work with Bernhard Nebel, Benedikt Löwe, Andreas Witzel, and Yanjing Wang.