Towards a Model for Embodied Emotions

We are interested in developing A-Life-like models to study the evolution of emotional systems in artificial worlds inhabited by autonomous agents. This paper focuses on the emotional component of an agent at its very basic physical level. We adopt an evolutionary perspective by modelling the agent based on biologically plausible principles, whereby emotions emerge from homeostatic mechanisms. We suggest that the agent should be embodied so as to allow its behaviour to be affected by low-level physical tasks. By embodiment we mean that the agent has a virtual physical body whose states can be sensed by the agent itself. The simulations show the emergence of a stable emotional system with emotional contexts resulting from dynamical categorization of objects in the world. This proved to be effective and versatile enough to allow the agent to adapt itself to unknown world configurations. The results are coherent with Antonio Damasio´s theory of background emotional system (2000). We demonstrate that body/world categorizations and body maps can evolve from a simple rule: self-survival