An Overview of Affective Motivational Collaboration Theory

The capability of collaboration is critical in the design of symbiotic cognitive systems. To obtain this functional capability, a cognitive system should possess evaluative and communicative processes. Emotions and their underlying processes provide such functions in social and collaborative environments. We investigate the mutual influence of affective and collaboration processes in a cognitive theory to support the interaction between humans and robots or virtual agents. We have developed new algorithms for these processes, as well as a new overall computational model for implementing collaborative robots and agents. We build primarily on the cognitive appraisal theory of emotions and the SharedPlans theory of collaboration to investigate the structure, fundamental processes and functions of emotions in a collaboration context. Intelligence is a set of mental abilities that enables a human to comprehend, reason and adapt in the environment, and as a result, act effectively and purposefully in that environment. Emotions play a crucial role in humans’ explanation of intelligent behaviors. Emotions affect not only what people do, but also the way they do it (Cowie, Sussman, and Ben-Ze’ev 2011). Sousa in The Rationality of Emotion (1990) makes a case for claiming that humans are capable of rationality largely because they are creatures with emotions. Emotions significantly impact different procedures of goal management and action generation, execution, control, and interpretation (Zhu and Thagard 2002). Emotions are dynamic episodes that not only make changes in cognitive states, but also produce a sequence of response patterns on one’s verbal and nonverbal behaviors (Scherer and Eligring 2007). Emotions typically occur in response to an event, usually a social event, real, remembered, anticipated, or imagined. They are associated with distinctive relational meanings with the individual’s experiences and environment (Parkinson 2009). Emotions are evaluative and responsive patterns that serve the function of providing appraisal about whether the ongoing event is harmful or beneficial for the well-being of an individual (Zhu and Thagard 2002). Therefore, reasoning and emotional processes have an integral and a supportive relationship, rather than a conflicting one. Copyright c © 2016, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved. The idea of having robots or other intelligent agents living in a human environment has been a persistent dream from science fiction books to artificial intelligence and robotics laboratories. However, there are many challenges in achieving collaboration between robots and humans in the same environment. Some of these challenges involve physical requirements, some involve cognitive requirements, and some involve social requirements. Thus far, there has been an emphasis on the design of robots to deal with the physical requirements. Many researchers are also working on the cognitive requirements, inspired by a diverse set of disciplines (Laird 2012; Scheutz, Harris, and Schermerhorn 2013). As time passes, there is an increasing recognition of the importance of the social requirements, and how cognitive systems can include the influence of others. Social Functions of Emotions Emotions describe interpersonal dynamics in a way that they can constitute individuals’ relationships (Tiedens and Leach 2004). Humans are able to communicate their emotions in a social context. The social functions of emotions are the reason behind why humans try to communicate their emotions. One aspect of expressing and communicating emotion in a social context is to express one’s social motives and intentions (Hess and Thibault 2009). Another aspect of communicating emotions is to reveal the underlying mental states of an individual (Parkinson 2005). In (2009) Van Kleef has discussed the idea of inferential processes with which individuals can infer information about others’ feelings, relational orientations and behavioral intentions based on their emotional expressions. He also argues that emotional expressions can impact social interactions by eliciting others’ affective responses.