Abstract not found

The question is not whether intelligent machines can have any emotions, but whether machines can be intelligent without any emotions. – Marvin Minsky, (Minsky, 1986) p. 163 In every art form it is the emotional content that makes the difference between mere technical skill and true art.

What was noted by E. J. hanger (1978) remains true today: that much of contemporary psychological research is based on the assumption that people are consciously and systematically processing incoming information in order to construe and interpret their world and to plan and engage in courses of action. As did E. J. hanger, the authors question this assumption. First, they review evidence that the ability to exercise such conscious, intentional control is actually quite limited, so that most of moment-to-moment psychological life must occur through nonconscious means if it is to occur at all. The authors then describe the different possible mechanisms that produce automatic, environmental control over these various phenomena and review evidence establishing both the existence of these mechanisms as well as their consequences for judgments, emotions, and

Virtually all current theories of choice under risk or uncertainty are cognitive and consequentialist. They assume that people assess the desirability and likelihood of possible outcomes of choice alternatives and integrate this information through some type of expectation-based calculus to arrive at a decision. The authors propose an alternative theoretical perspective, the risk-as-feelings hypothesis, that highlights the role of affect experienced at the moment of decision making. Drawing on research from clinical, physiological, and other subfields of psychology, they show that emotional reactions to risky situations often diverge from cognitive assessments of those risks. When such divergence occurs, emotional reactions often drive behavior. The risk-as-feelings hypothesis is shown to explain a wide range of phenomena that have resisted interpretation in cognitive-consequentialist terms.

This is the manuscript that was published, with only minor copy-editing alterations, as: Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review. 108, 814-834 Copyright 2001, American Psychological Association To obtain a reprint of the final type-set article, please go through your library’s journal services, or contact the author directly Research on moral judgment has been dominated by rationalist models, in which moral judgment is thought to be caused by moral reasoning. Four reasons are given for considering the hypothesis that moral reasoning does not cause moral judgment; rather, moral reasoning is usually a post-hoc construction, generated after a judgment has been reached. The social intuitionist model is presented as an alternative to rationalist models. The model is a social model in that it de-emphasizes the private reasoning done by individuals, emphasizing instead the importance of social and cultural influences. The model is an intuitionist model in that it states that moral judgment is generally the result of quick, automatic evaluations (intuitions). The model is more consistent than rationalist models with recent findings in social, cultural, evolutionary, and biological psychology, as well as anthropology and primatology. Author notes

StartleCam is a wearable video camera, computer, and sensing system, which enables the camera to be controlled via both conscious and preconscious events involving the wearer. Traditionally, a wearer consciously hits record on the video camera, or runs a computer script to trigger the camera according to some pre-specified frequency. The system described here offers an additional option: images are saved by the system when it detects certain events of supposed interest to the wearer. The implementation described here aims to capture events that are likely to get the user's attention and to be remembered. Attention and memory are highly correlated with what psychologists call arousal level, and the latter is often signaled by skin conductivity changes; consequently, StartleCam monitors the wearer's skin conductivity. StartleCam looks for patterns indicative of a "startle response" in the skin conductivity signal. When this response is detected, a buffer of digital images, recently captured by the wearer's digital camera, is downloaded and optionally transmitted wirelessly to a webserver. This selective storage of digital images creates a "flashbulb" memory archive for the wearable which aims to mimic the wearer' Using a startle detection filter, the StartleCam system has been demonstrated to work on several wearers in both indoor and outdoor ambulatory environments.

People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. Across 4 studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd. Several analyses linked this miscalibration to deficits in metacognitive skill, or the capacity to distinguish accuracy from error. Paradoxically, improving the skills of participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities. It is one of the essential features of such incompetence that the person so afflicted is incapable of knowing that he is incompetent. To have such knowledge would already be to remedy a good portion of the offense. (Miller, 1993, p. 4) In 1995, McArthur Wheeler walked into two Pittsburgh banks

This paper, an expanded version of a talk on love given to a literary society, attempts to analyse some of the architectural requirements for an agent which is capable of having primary, secondary and tertiary emotions, including being infatuated or in love. It elaborates on work done previously in the Birmingham Cognition and Affect group, describing our proposed three level architecture (with reactive, deliberative and metamanagement layers), showing how different sorts of emotions relate to those layers. Some of the relationships between emotional states involving partial loss of control of attention (e.g. emotional states involved in being in love) and other states which involve dispositions (e.g. attitudes such as loving) are discussed and related to the architecture. The work of poets and playwrights can be shown to involve an implicit commitment to the hypothesis that minds are (at least) information processing engines. Besides loving, many other familiar states and process...

There is much shallow thinking about emotions, and a huge diversity of definitions of “emotion ” arises out of this shallowness. Too often the definitions and theories are inspired either by a mixture of introspection and selective common sense, or by a misdirected neo-behaviourist methodology, attempting to define emotions and other mental states in terms of observables. One way to avoid such shallowness, and perhaps eventually achieve convergence, is to base concepts and theories on an information processing architecture, which is subject to various constraints, including evolvability, implementability, coping with resource-limited physical mechanisms, and human-like functionality. Within such an architecture-based theory we can distinguish (at least) primary emotions, secondary emotions, and tertiary emotions, and produce a coherent theory which explains a wide range of phenomena and also partly explains the diversity of theories: most theorists focus on only a subset of types of emotions.

This paper discusses the issues pertinent to the development of a meaningful social interaction between robots and people through employing degrees of anthropomorphism in a robot's physical design and behaviour. As robots enter our social space, we will inherently project/impose our interpretation on their actions similar to the techniques we employ in rationalising for example, a pet's behaviour. This propensity to anthropomorphise is not seen as a hindrance to social robot development, but rather a useful mechanism that requires judicious examination and employment in social robot research.