Embedding emotions in an artificial tutor

Emotions have been shown to have an important role on several human processes such as decision-making, planning, cognition, and, in particular, learning. However, many e-learning systems disregard the emotional aspects of the learning process and the impact of these aspects on the student´s performance. The paper presents an intelligent agent with synthesized emotions that influence its beliefs, desires, and intentions in order to drive the agent behavior. Based on this model, we propose an artificial tutor, integrated in an e-learning system, which develops lectures plans and tailors its behavior towards the student according to the student reactions and his/her presumed affective states.