Using an Emotional Intelligent Agent to Improve the Learner’s Performance

Emotions are now seen as closely related to cognition processes including decision-making, memory, attention, etc. Thus, e-learning environments have begun to take into consideration the emotional state of the learner in order to enhance his performance. In this paper, we present an agent architecture that includes some emotional intelligence capabilities; we describe each of its components: The perception module, the control module and the action module. These modules are intended respectively to: (1) know the current emotion of the learner; (2) detect when to intervene, basing on the appraisal theory, to change the emotional state of the learner; (3) and induce the optimal emotional state for learning.