Modeling the cognitive antecedents and consequences of emotion

The last decade has seen an explosion of interest in emotion in both the social and computational sciences. Emotions arise from interactions with both people and technology. They color human perception and decision making and shape a person’s moment-to-moment responses to their social and physical environment. Emotions are expressed through changes in speech, facial expression, posture and physiological processes, and these changes provide essential clues to a person’s beliefs, desires, intentions and likely future behavior. Recognizing and exploiting such influences can have broad impact across a variety of disciplines: Incorporating the influence of emotion increases explanatory power of models of human decision making (Loewenstein & Lerner, 2003 and the articles by Parkinson and by Clore and Palmer in this special issue); Responding to a student’s emotions can enhance the effectiveness of human or computer tutors (Conati & MacLaren, 2004; Graesser et al., 2008; Lepper, 1988); And modeling emotional influences can enhance the fidelity of social simulations, including how crowds react in disasters (Lyell, Flo, & Mejia-Tellez, 2006; Silverman, Johns, O'Brien, Weaver, & Cornwell, 2002), how military units respond to the stress of battle (Gratch & Marsella, 2003), and even large social situations as when modeling the economic impact of traumatic events such as 9/11 or modeling inter-group conflicts (Marsella, Pynadath, & Read, 2004).