An Emotional Model for Synthetic Characters with Personality

In recent years, emotional computing has found an important application domain in the field of interactive synthetic characters. Interesting examples of this domain are computer games, interface agents, human-robot interaction, etc. However, few systems in this area include a model of personality, although it plays an important role in differentiating agents and determining the way they experience emotions and the way they behave. Some work explicitly take into account the personality of the characters. In [3], personality is viewed as a number of weights on different goals of agents. [1] uses formulas that determine how personality influences the way an agent experiences emotion. However, these papers do not focus on how personality influences the feeling and the expression of emotions at every step of the emotional process. In our work, we introduce an emotional model for synthetic characters that relies on a formal model of personality. We use studies from the field of psychology, regarding emotions, personality and the correlation between them in order to define a character able to express appropriate emotions in response to various situations. Several personality models have been defined in psychology research. These models consist of a set of factors, where every factor is a specific property of the personality. Emotions have already been widely studied in psychology. Much research work, related to cognitive appraisal theory, proposes various criteria in order to distinguish emotions (see for example OCC Model [4]). However, the emotional process defined in these models is not complete [2], i.e. it does not specify how the personality factors influence the feeling of emotions. Moreover, links between emotions and their intensity, and the intensity thresholds corresponding to the activation of each emotion are not defined.