Emergent Communication for Co-constructed Emotion Between Embodied Agents via Collective Predictive Coding

TL;DR

This paper models emergent communication between embodied agents to understand how shared emotional understanding develops, demonstrating that communication enhances alignment of emotion categories even with divergent interoceptive signals.

Contribution

It introduces a novel computational framework combining Collective Predictive Coding and the Metropolis-Hastings Naming Game to simulate social emotion co-construction.

Findings

Communication improves emotion category alignment and clarity.

Alignment is concentrated at the symbolic layer rather than perceptual representations.

Robust categorical alignment occurs despite divergent interoceptive dynamics.

Abstract

According to the theory of constructed emotion, the brain actively forms emotion categories by integrating multimodal bodily signals, and constructs emotional experiences by using these categories to predict and interpret sensory inputs. While research has advanced in modeling individual emotion construction, the social process of co-construction-how a shared understanding of emotions emerges between individuals-remains computationally underexplored. This study investigates this process by modeling emergent communication between two embodied agents using the Metropolis-Hastings Naming Game (MHNG), grounded in the Collective Predictive Coding (CPC) framework. Our experiments, using visual, auditory, and simulated interoceptive inputs, yield two main findings. First, MHNG-based communication significantly improves the alignment, clarity, and inter-agent agreement of the learned emotion categories compared to non-communicative and non-selective baselines, with the alignment effect concentrated at the symbolic layer rather than the perceptual latent representation. Second, even when the two agents have systematically divergent interoceptive dynamics, communication still produces robust categorical alignment, with distinct, category-specific reshaping patterns of each agent's emotion categories-consistent with the constructed-emotion view that interoceptive heterogeneity is constitutive of, rather than an obstacle to, shared emotional meaning. These findings provide computational support for the co-constructionist view of emotion and extend the CPC framework from physical to socially-grounded domains.