Dynamic Emotion Representation system

My motivation is to participate in the creation of Virtual Humans as described in Gratch et al, 2002. The research into Virtual Humans brings together many different fields, such as computer graphics, Artificial Intelligence, speech recognition, speech synthesis, psychology, philosophy and many more. But my interest is orientated towards emotions and personalities. Much work has been carried out to give emotions and personality to Virtual Humans or agents, as I will call them later in this report. But no one has implemented a complete emotional system, from environment appraisal to action selection and including all types of emotions. I am not proposing to solve this problem and to do all the work but instead I propose to separate the huge task in smaller ones. I will concentrate on a dynamic representation of emotion or a Dynamic Emotion Representation as the title of this report suggests. In fact, through the remainder of the paper I will explain why it is possible to dissociate the representation of emotion from the generation of emotion and from the action selection. In the first place, I will give an overview of a theory of emotions in section 2; followed by a presentation of two theories of mood in section 3. A personality model is briefly introduced in section 4. Then, I will review the implementations of different emotional and personality models in section 5. In section 6, I will present my arguments for the implementation of a Dynamics Emotion Representation system. I will expose my first attempt of this implementation and its results in section 7. Finally, section 8 will explain the possible future developments and the conclusion will be section 9.