Cognitive computational models of emotions

Emotions are one of the important unconscious mechanisms that influence human behaviors, attentions, and decision making. The emotion process helps to determine how humans perceive their internal status and needs in order to form consciousness of an individual. Emotions have been studied from multidisciplinary perspectives and covered a wide range of empirical and psychological topics, such as understanding the emotional processes, creating cognitive and computational models of emotions, and applications in computational intelligence. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of cognitive and computational models of emotions resulted from multidisciplinary studies. We concentrate on exploring how cognitive models have served as the theoretical basis of the computational models of emotions. A comparative analysis of current approaches is elaborated with discussions of how recent advances in this area may improve the development of a coherent Cognitive Computational Model of Emotions (C²MEs), which leads to the machine simulated emotions for cognitive robots and autonomous agent systems in cognitive informatics and cognitive computing.