A logical formalization of the OCC theory of emotions

Abstract

In this paper, we provide a logical formalization of the emotion triggering process and of its relationship with mental attitudes, as described in Ortony, Clore, and Collins's theory. We argue that modal logics are particularly adapted to represent agents' mental attitudes and to reason about them, and use a specific modal logic that we call Logic of Emotions in order to provide logical definitions of all but two of their 22 emotions. While these definitions may be subject to debate, we show that they allow to reason about emotions and to draw interesting conclusions from the theory.

Other-Condemning Anger = Blaming Accountable Agents for Unattainable Desires

“…Although the importance of emotion intensity has been stressed by appraisal theorist, most of the formal models in the literature have ignored at least one of them. For example, [1,9,15] ignores emotion intensity and [2] does not have multi-agent flavor. Although our proposal is inspired by [2], we believe the model should be modified significantly in order to accommodate the characteristic feature of other-condemning emotions.…”

Social Human-Robot Interaction: A New Cognitive and Affective Interaction-Oriented Architecture

“…It provides agents with generic reasoning capabilities and emotions. Concretely, it enables the implementation of various logical models of emotions, such as the OCC theory [2] or theories about shame [3]. It has also been recently extended with coping strategies [4] and some personality traits.…”

A formal model of emotion triggers: an approach for BDI agents

“…2.2 The logical structure of the OCC model Although many ad hoc or simplified implementations of the OCC model have been made, there have been fewer attempts at formalizing the complete, logical structure of the proposed emotion model (e.g., Adam et al 2009;Gratch and Marsella 2004;Steunebrink 2010;Steunebrink et al 2007). Here we will attempt to do so, using a formal logic containing constructs to reason about agents, their beliefs and actions, objects, and consequences of actions/events.…”

“…Many formalizations appear to use OCC's notion of prospect in only one of these senses. For example, Adam et al (2009) and Gratch and Marsella (2004) only used uncertain prospects when formalizing hope and fear, whereas Steunebrink et al (2007) only used future prospects.…”

“…Recently, there has been a lot of interest in bringing emotions to Artificial Intelligence, in particular to model rational agents (Adam et al 2009;Breazeal 2002;Dastani and Meyer 2006;Gratch and Marsella 2004;Johns and Silverman 2001;Marinier and Laird 2004;Picard 1997;Sloman 2001;Steunebrink 2010;Steunebrink et al 2007Steunebrink et al , 2008Steunebrink et al , 2009). There are (at least) three important reasons for this.…”