Use of Intelligent Emotional Agents in the Animation of Autonomous Virtual Creatures

Recently several psychologists have begun the exploration and study of emotions to explain better their functioning. The obtained results give evidence that emotions have an important impact on thinking, judgment, reasoning, memory and decision making of human being. In this work we describe a new faculty called artificial emotional intelligence (AEI), and we propose a model based on emotional intelligence (EI) to develop a new approach to the problem of mood and emotion control in the animation of avatars or virtual creatures (VC). We use intelligent emotional agents to control the behavior of the avatars in 3D virtual environments. Our proposal about AEI relates cognitive processes of avatar involving emotional information. These processes include mainly: appraising and expressing emotions and regulating emotion in the self and others, and using emotions in adaptive ways.