e-Genia3 An AgentSpeak extension for empathic agents

TL;DR

This paper introduces e-Genia3, an extension of AgentSpeak that enables the development of empathic agents capable of distinguishing self from others, simulating emotional responses, and maintaining long-term affective links for more realistic interactions.

Contribution

e-Genia3 extends AgentSpeak with new reasoning processes for empathy, including emotion elicitation, regulation, and memory-based affective links, advancing empathic agent development.

Findings

Supports empathic emotion elicitation based on event analysis.

Enables long-term affective links through memory of past interactions.

Differentiates between self and other agents in emotional appraisal.

Abstract

In this paper, we present e-Genia3 an extension of AgentSpeak to provide support to the development of empathic agents. The new extension modifies the agent's reasoning processes to select plans according to the analyzed event and the affective state and personality of the agent. In addition, our proposal allows a software agent to simulate the distinction between self and other agents through two different event appraisal processes: the empathic appraisal process, for eliciting emotions as a response to other agents emotions, and the regular affective appraisal process for other non-empathic affective events. The empathic regulation process adapts the elicited empathic emotion based on intrapersonal factors (e.g., the agent's personality and affective memory) and interpersonal characteristics of the agent (e.g., the affective link between the agents). The use of a memory of past events and their corresponding elicited emotions allows the maintaining of an affective link to support long-term empathic interaction between agents.