Incorporating emotion regulation into virtual stories

Abstract

This paper presents an approach to incorporate emotion regulation as addressed within psychology literature into virtual characters. To this end, first Gross’ informal theory of emotion regulation has been formalised using a dynamical system style modelling approach. Next, a virtual environment has been created, involving a number of virtual agents, which have been equipped with the formalised model for emotion regulation. This environment has been used to successfully generate a number of emergent virtual stories, in which characters regulate their emotions by applying regulation strategies such as situation selection and attentional deployment. The behaviours shown in the stories were found consistent with descriptions of human regulation processes.