A logic of emotions: from appraisal to coping

Emotion is a cognitive mechanism that directs an agent’s thoughts and attention to what is relevant, important, and significant. Such a mechanism is crucial for the design of resource-bounded agents that must operate in highly-dynamic, semi-predictable environments and which need mechanisms for allocating their computational resources efficiently. The aim of this work is to propose a logical analysis of emotions and their influences on an agent’s behavior. We focus on four emotion types (viz., hope, fear, joy, and distress) and provide their logical characterizations in a modal logic framework. As the intensity of emotion is essential for its influence on an agent’s behavior, the logic is devised to represent and reason about graded beliefs, graded goals and intentions. The belief strength and the goal strength determine the intensity of emotions. Emotions trigger different types of coping strategy which are aimed at dealing with emotions either by forming or revising an intention to act in the world, or by changing the agent’s interpretation of the situation (by changing beliefs or goals).