Coping strategies in a BDI logic: How can agents do to drop their negative emotions

In the agent community, more and more researchers get interested in designing believable embodied agents with emotions. The focus is on the agent’s external believability, i.e. the realism of their emotional expressions, neglecting the internal believability of the emotional processes. In this paper we ground on an existing formalization of emotions, that only accounts for appraisal (the psychological process leading to the triggering of emotions), and express in the same formalism (namely BDI logics) the process of coping (the individual’s effort to manage a stressful situation). Indeed, following Lazarus, these two processes are indivisible for the description of human emotions. We thus consider coping strategies as particular actions with effects on the agent’s mental attitudes. We formalize some strategies by expressing their preconditions and effects in a BDI logic, and then illustrate their functioning on an example from a training simulation application for firemen.