Mapping emotion to color

The sensitive artificial listener (SAL) project is interested in ways to elicit emotions from humans. This can be done in several ways; one of them is by presenting colors. The use of colors to stimulate a certain feeling, may it be calm, aggressive, energetic, happy etc. This paper tries to provide a method for generating colors to elicit a certain feelings based on an emotional state from the SAL agent. This is done by mapping the emotional state of the agent into a color. The emotional state is represented by two values Pleasure and Arousal these two form the two dimensional space in which the distinctive emotions can be placed. The emotional state of the agent is a point (coordinate) on the same 2d space, and by looking at the position of this point the current corresponding color can be calculated by interpolating between the emotions on the 2d space. The end use is to use colors elicit a certain feeling in the user, how the agent uses this to his advantage is up to the agent. Examples of use can be, the agents virtual body changes color (expressing his emotion), or the complete virtual world gets a change in color glow (a narrow emotional commitment), or a more physical example the lights in your house change colors (a broad emotional commitment).