Geneve Emotion Research Group, FPSE, University of Geneva
9, route de Drize, CH-1227 Carouge-Geneve
A communality between research in Artificial Intelligence and Synthetic Emoti on is that it seems in both cases to be rather difficult to give an acceptable definition of the naturally occurring counterpart. One could speculate whether this is due to the multiplicity of the nature of both phenomena or due to a categorical misconception. The synthetic approach in emotion psychology promi ses to shed some light on the fundamental theoretical problems, in analogy to the achievements gained t hrough the paradigm in New Artificial Intelligence. I will try to briefly outline a number of differ ent motivations for modeling an emotional agent, and to relate those motivations to two different design appr oaches. Some contemporary psychological theory of emotion is conceptually summarized to illustrate some questions that I feel should be addressed when talking about the grounding of emotions in adaptive systems.