Socially emotional brain-inspired cognitive architecture framework for artificial intelligence

Artificial Intelligence of the next generation needs to interact with users socially, convincing them in its ability to understand human minds, including emotions. For this to happen, an artificial emotional intelligence is needed, capable of adequate, believable behavior in social emotional interactions. Building on previous developments, the present work extends the general framework of emotional Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architecture (eBICA: Samsonovich, 2013, 2018), endowing it with fluents describing, in addition to appraisals, somatic markers, feelings, emotions, moods, emotional reactions and biases. Key building blocks that integrate them are moral schemas and semantic maps. The model describes interaction of three factors: plans and commitments, moral and ethical values, and somatic comfort. Learning in this framework includes self-organization of semantic maps that in turn may provide guidance for active humanlike learning. Implications for empirical studies and practical applications are discussed together with the expected impact.     

Generalizability of carry-over effects in the emotional Stroop task

The emotional Stroop task has been the most widely used task to examine attentional bias to emotionally salient stimuli. In one format of this task, words are presented to participants in a mixed randomized or quasi-randomized sequence. Using a mixed smoking Stroop task, we have previously demonstrated that smokers are slower to respond to words which follow smoking-related words than words which follow neutral words. Here we show that this carry-over effect is present in heroin addicts-but not control subjects-in a heroin Stroop task, and in normal subjects in a stress Stroop task. Thus, the effect generalizes to other populations. In addition, an examination of the studies that have collected data from both mixed and blocked formats provides converging evidence for the presence of carry-over effects. We discuss the implications of the carry-over effect for research using the emotional Stroop task.     

Something from nothing: exploring dimensions of children's knowing through the repeated reading of favourite books

Witte‐Townsend and DiGiulio explore some of the dimensions of knowing that children, teachers and parents may engage together during story‐time. They reflect on some of their own long‐term relationships with children and children's books, especially Phoebe Gilman's Gilman P 1992 Something from nothing (New York, NY, Scholastic Inc)  [Google Scholar] Something from nothing (published in 1992) and Simms Taback's Taback S 1999 Joseph had a little overcoat (New York, NY, Viking‐Penguin)  [Google Scholar] Joseph had a little overcoat, published in 1999. The authors probe issues such as why children ask to hear a favourite story over and over and why they suddenly abandon all interest and move on to a new book. They explore the meaning of the silences that sometimes arise during story‐time, pooling around the young listeners as the last words of the book are read. Witte‐Townsend and DiGiulio remind us of the value of literature in the lives of children and they affirm that the reading and re‐reading of favourite stories enables the understanding of complex human issues and contributes significantly to social, emotional and spiritual growth.     

Predicting traumatic stress using emotional intelligence

The study investigated whether emotional intelligence (EI) can predict how individuals respond to traumatic experiences. A random sample of 414 participants (181 male, 233 female) were administered a measure of EI along with the Impact of Event Scale--revised [IES-R; Weiss, D. S. & Marmar, C. R. (1997). The Impact of Events Scale--revised. In J.P. Wilson & T.M. Keane (Eds.), Assessing psychological trauma and PTSD (pp. 399-411). New York: Guilford Press], and the monitoring and blunting questionnaire [MBQ, Anxiety Stress Coping 7 (1994) 53]. The results showed that participants with higher NEIS scores report fewer psychological symptoms relating to their traumatic experiences, that monitors are more likely to have higher NEIS scores than blunters. Traumatic events had a greater impact on females than males, and males had higher EI than females. The implications of these findings for using EI as a predictor for individuals who may experience traumatic stress are discussed.     

Emotional avoidance: an experimental test of individual differences and response suppression using biological challenge

The present study examined the affective consequences of response inhibition during a state of anxiety-related physical stress. Forty-eight non-clinical participants were selected on the basis of pre-experimental differences in emotional avoidance (high versus low) and subjected to four inhalations of 20% carbon dioxide-enriched air. Half of the participants were instructed to inhibit the challenge-induced aversive emotional state, whereas the other half was instructed to simply observe their emotional response. Participants high in emotional avoidance compared to those low in emotional avoidance responded with greater levels of anxiety and affective distress but not physiological arousal. Individuals high in emotional avoidance also reported greater levels of anxiety relative to the low emotional avoidance group when suppressing compared to observing bodily sensations. These findings are discussed in terms of the significance of emotional avoidance processes during physical stress, with implications for better understanding the nature of panic disorder.     

On the lateralization of emotional prosody: an event-related functional MR investigation

In order to investigate the lateralization of emotional speech we recorded the brain responses to three emotional intonations in two conditions, i.e., "normal" speech and "prosodic" speech (i.e., speech with no linguistic meaning, but retaining the 'slow prosodic modulations' of speech). Participants listened to semantically neutral sentences spoken with a positive, neutral, or negative intonation in both conditions and judged how positive, negative, or neutral the intonation was on a five-point scale. Core peri-sylvian language areas, as well as some frontal and subcortical areas were activated bilaterally in the normal speech condition. In contrast, a bilateral fronto-opercular region was active when participants listened to prosodic speech. Positive and negative intonations elicited a bilateral fronto-temporal and subcortical pattern in the normal speech condition, and more frontal activation in the prosodic speech condition. The current results call into question an exclusive right hemisphere lateralization of emotional prosody and expand patient data on the functional role of the basal ganglia during the perception of emotional prosody.     

Empathy, an integrative model

Empathy research has yielded various separate insights into empathy and its correlates. Yet a comprehensive theoretical account that situates these factors within a larger framework is lacking. In this paper a conception of empathy is proposed and defended, which makes it possible to provide an encompassing reconstruction of the processes that are characteristic of empathic encounters. This conception situates empathy within a context of communication. Doing so allows one to connect various treads in empathy research, but at the same time urges one to take new factors into account. It is argued that empathy is a response to a specific demand occurring in a specific context. The type of answer persons are able to provide depends on four types of factors. First, there are the psychological empathic components. We argue that empathy should be seen as a combination of (especially) parallel and reactive emotions, against a background of specific cognitive abilities. Second, it is argued that empathy is aided by a twofold control system, comprised of judgements and forms of self-control. Third, personality factors play a part in how a person responds to demands. Finally, but most importantly, it is pointed out that specific relational factors codetermine empathic reactions. In this paper we describe the theoretical background of our model and provide an elaborated account of the four factors that determine empathic acts in a given context. We illustrate the viability of our model by presenting observational data of children's empathic acts.     

Emotion regulation and aggression

This review considers the impact of deliberate emotion regulation on aggression, by integrating findings from recent emotion regulation research with a contemporary model of aggressive behavior, the General Aggression Model. First, it considers how individuals who under-regulate anger and other emotions may be more likely to behave aggressively in an attempt to repair, terminate, or avoid uncomfortable emotional states. Second, it explores how over-regulation of emotion may lead to aggressive behavior by increasing negative affect, reducing inhibitions against aggression, compromising decision making processes, diminishing social networks, increasing physiological arousal and hindering the resolution of difficult situations. Finally, it reviews three skills thought to underlie deliberate emotion regulation: emotional awareness, emotional acceptance and proficiency in a variety of emotion regulation strategies. Treatment encompassing all of these skills may improve an individual's ability to regulate difficult emotion states more adaptively and thereby lessen aggressive behavior.