that argues for emotion’s role in decision making.

EMA maintains that appraisal and coping shape, but do not determine, the agent’s response; for example, whether an agent copes by forming the intention to act hinges on whether its planning and problem-solving processes can identify an appropriate intention or plan. Recall the umbrella the actress was holding in the bird scenario. EMA maintains the response of preparing to whack the bird depends on the emotional response to the threat and the fact that holding the umbrella beforehand may enable (or prime) cognition’s formation of the intention.

At the same time, EMA also has significant shortcomings, thus identifying challenges for research on computational models, as well as underlying theories. Most notably, EMA’s appraisal process focuses on deriving appraisal values and treats emotion categories largely as epiphenomenal. Another limitation follows from the inferential processes that support appraisal by maintaining the causal interpretation. In particular, because the causal interpretation has limited capacity to model the beliefs of other agents, more complex social emotions (such as embarrassment) are not modeled. The inference processes also need to impose better constraints on coping strategies specifically due to the absence of constraints on belief revision; the overall model allows for wishful thinking and resignation that alters beliefs and goals while ignoring potential effects on related beliefs or goals; see Ito et al. 19 for a utility-based approach to address this limitation.

Nevertheless, both the strengths
and weaknesses of a model like EMA
support the idea of computational
modeling of emotions as a powerful
approach to addressing the question of
the processes underlying emotion and
its relation to cognition. Constructing
EMA forced us to make specific com-
mitments about the representation of
the person-environment relationship,
the computation of appraisals based
on these representations, the role of
perception, memory, interpretation,
and inference in appraisal, the mod-
eling of coping, and the relationship
among appraisals, emotions, and cop-
ing. Further, once computationally re-
turn, affects subsequent reappraisals
of the situation. Emotional meaning
thus evolves in EMA as the individual
interacts with the physical and the so-
cial environment.

Role in Theory Formation and Testing

As noted, the relation between emotion and rational thought is a debate of long standing. One benefit of computational models is they are potentially powerful research tools that weigh on such debates by forcing explicit commitments as to how mental processes are realized, how they interrelate, and how the processes unfold over time.

EMA, in particular, makes an explicit commitment to the relation between emotion and an agent’s cognitive processes. Appraisal is treated as fundamentally reactive, an automatic assessment of the contents of mental representations. Differences in the temporal course of emotion dynamics are accordingly due to differences in the temporal course of eliciting conditions, perceptual processes, and inferential processes that maintain the representation of the person-environment relation, including both deliberative and reactive processes. This allows the model to explain in a uniform way both fast, seemingly automatic emotion responses, and slower, seemingly more deliberative responses, in contrast to more complex models and theories that postulate multiple processes. 12, 32

EMA assumes cognition and per-
ception encodes the personal rel-
evance of events in ways that make
appraisal simple, fast, and general,
evolving as cognitive processes up-
date the agent-environment relation-
ship. Appraisal is thus not so much a
process as it is an output requirement
on cognition and perception. The
values generated by those processes
constitute the appraisal values. Simi-
larly, we pose the inverse requirement
on coping strategies, that the output
of coping is the adjustment of atten-
tion, beliefs, desires, and intentions
on which cognition and appraisal rely.
Coping can be viewed as an inverse of
the appraisal process, seeking to ad-
just the causal interpretation in order
to alter subsequent appraisals.

These design commitments follow from our effort to address key challenges for any model of emotion. One such challenge is to explain the often rapid, seemingly reactive, dynamics of emotional process, as outlined in the bird example, that have been raised as a challenge to appraisal theories. 40 Another challenge is that emotions arise and evolve over a wide range of eliciting situations, from physical events to complex social situations.

In EMA, the generality of appraisal to address complex social interactions, as well as the demands of physical threats, is due largely to appraisal’s separation from a range of perceptual and cognitive processes it leverages. EMA also generalizes the role of emotion in an agent’s overall architecture. In EMA, appraisal and coping play a central role in mediating response for the agent generally. This role is in keeping with Simon’s view35 of emotion as an interrupt mechanism and research4

Figure 3. Virtual human accident scene (USC Institute for Creative Technologies).