An Interdependent Model of Personality, Motivation, Emotion, and Mood for Intelligent Virtual Agents
Abstract
Building intelligent agents that can believably interact with humans is a difficult yet important task in a host of applications, including therapy, education, and entertainment. We submit that in order to enhance believability, the agent's affective state should be accurately modeled and should realistically influence the agent's behavior. We propose a computational model of affect which incorporates an empirically-based interplay between its various affective components - personality, motivation, emotion, and mood. Further, our model captures a number of salient mechanisms that are observable in humans and that influence the agent's behavior. We are therefore hopeful that our model will facilitate more engaging and meaningful human-agent interactions. We evaluate our model and illustrate its efficacy, as well as the importance of the different components in the model and their interplay.
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Picard, R. W. (1997) · MIT Press · doi:10.7551/mitpress/1140.001.0001 · Cited by 7,382 · see citing works
Mehrabian, A. (1996) · Current Psychology · doi:10.1007/bf02686918 · Cited by 1,493 · see citing works
EMA: A process model of appraisal dynamics
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“The influential EMA model [20] attempts to capture the complete range of human emotion, in addition to being the first computational model of affect to include emotional coping.”
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Piao, J., Yan, Y., Zhang, J., Li, N., Yan, J., Lan, X., Lu, Z., Zheng, Z., Wang, J. Y., Zhou, D., et al. (2025) · doi:10.2139/ssrn.5954414 · Cited by 43 · see citing works
Piao, J., Yan, Y., Zhang, J., Li, N., Yan, J., Lan, X., Lu, Z., Zheng, Z., Wang, J. Y., Zhou, D., et al. (2025) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2502.08691 · Cited by 43 · see citing works
“Humans are driven by an intricate interplay of feelings, motivations, and thought processes that shape their decisions and interactions [90, 7].”
- Authors
- Shvo, M., Buhmann, J., & Kapadia, M.
- Affiliations
- University of Toronto (CA)
- Walt Disney (Switzerland) (CH)
- Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey (US)
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 19th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2019-07
- Pages
- 65-72
- OpenAlex
- W2955393042
- Cited by
- 26
- References
- 3
- Citations by year
- 2026: 3 · 2025: 6 · 2024: 3 · 2023: 1 · 2022: 8 · 2021: 3 · 2020: 2
- FWCI
- 5.31
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA) (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Social Robot Interaction and HRI
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Psychiatry, Mental Health, Neuroscience
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Emotion and Mood Recognition
- Keywords
- affective computing, emotional agents, personality, motivation, emotions, mood, human-agent interaction, believable agents, agent behavior
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