Emotions: from psychological theories to logical formalization and implementation in a BDI agent

Abstract

This thesis is about emotions, and more particularly about their logical formalization. The first part is dedicated to the state of the art, from the point of view of both psychology (history of theories of emotions) and computer science (presentation of emotional agents and their applications).The second part is dedicated to the logical formalisation of emotions. It introduces our logical framework, exposes and argues the formal definitions of twenty emotions, and proves some of their properties. Finally the last part is dedicated to practical applications and continuation prospects of this work. Such a work offers interesting contributions : it offers to the agent community a formal model of a great number of emotions; it shows the interest of BDI logics; and it opens research prospects about the dynamics of emotions and their influence on the behaviour of agents, a field not much explored for now.