February 12th at 17:30, in F1.15 (ILLC seminar room)
Emotions can be amazingly beneficial. They can help us draw attention to the things that are important around us, assist in social interactions, or influence the decisions we make. However, emotions can also be harmful, especially if they are of the wrong type, intensity, or duration. Luckily most researchers believe that we can regulate our emotions. Emotion regulation is now seen as an import cognitive function and is recently getting more and more attention within cognitive science. Next to this, cognitive computational modeling is a method that has become very influential within cognitive science and artificial intelligence. In this talk, I will discuss my AI master thesis, still a work in progress, in which I combine these two things. I will start by introducing cognitive computational modeling and emotion regulation, and explain why this might be interesting. I will talk about emotion theory in psychology and how a theory of emotion regulation fits into this theoretical landscape. I will also introduce some models of emotion theory, in particular EMA, a model of emotion developed by Gratch and Marsella at the Computational Emotion Group at the University of Southern California. Finally, I will give some suggestions of how EMA can be extended with a notion of emotion regulation.