Designing emotions for activity selection in autonomous agents

This chapter advocates a "bottom-up" philosophy for the design of emotional systems for autonomous agents that is guided by functional concerns and considers the particular case of designing emotions as mechanisms for action selection. The concrete realization of these ideas implies that the design process must start with an analysis of the requirements that the features of the environment, the characteristics of the action-selection task, and the agent architecture impose on the emotional system. This is particularly important if we see emotions as mechanisms that aim at modifying or maintaining the relation of the agent with its (external and internal) environment (rather than modifying the environment itself) in order to preserve the agent's goals. Emotions can then be selected and designed according to the roles they play with respect to this relation.