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Reasoning about Emotional Agents

Abstract

In this paper we are concerned with reasoning about agents with emotions. To be more precise: we aim at a logical account of emotional agents. The very topic may already raise some eyebrows. Reasoning / rationality and emotions seem opposites, and reasoning about emotions or a logic of emotional agents seems a contradiction in terms. However, emotions and rationality are known to be more interconnected than one may suspect. There is psychological evidence that having emotions may help one to do reasoning and tasks for which rationality seems to be the only factor [1]. Moreover, work by e.g. Sloman [5] shows that one may think of designing agentbased systems where these agents show some kind of emotions, and, even more importantly, display behaviour dependent on their emotional state. It is exactly in this sense that we aim at looking at emotional agents: artificial systems that are designed in such a manner that emotions play a role. Also in psychology emotions are viewed as a structuring mechanism. Emotions are held to help human beings to choose from a myriad of possible actions in response to what happens in ou

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