Marssi: Model Of Appraisal, Regulation, And Social Signal Interpretation

Understanding emotions of others requires a theory of mind approach providing knowledge of internal appraisal and regulation processes of emotions. Multi-modal social signal classification is insufficient for understanding emotional expressions. Mainly, because many communicative, emotional expressions are not directly related to internal emotional states. Moreover, the recognition of the expression's direction is neglected so far. Even if social signals reveal emotional aspects, the recognition with signal classifiers cannot explain internal appraisal or regulation processes. Using that information is one approach for building cognitive empathic agents with the ability to address observations and motives in an empathic dialogue. In this paper, we introduce a computational model of user emotions for empathic agents. It combines a simulation of appraisal and regulation processes with a social signal interpretation taking directions of expressions into account. Our evaluation shows that social signal sequences can be related to emotion regulation processes. Their recognition and using appraisal and regulation knowledge enables our agent to react empathically.