Emotional perception for updating agents´ beliefs

The relative influence of perception and situation in emotional judgments has been extensively debated in psychology. A main issue in this debate concerns how these sources of information are integrated. This work proposes a method able to make probabilistic predictions of appraisals of other agents, using mental models of those agents. From these appraisal predictions, predictions about another agent´s expressions are made, integrated with observations of the other agent´s ambiguous emotional expressions using Bayesian techniques, resulting in updates to the agent´s mental models. Our method is inspired by psychological work on human interpretation of emotional expressions. We demonstrate how these appraisals of others´ emotions and observations of their expressions can be an integral part of an agent capable of Theory of Mind reasoning.