Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When people reason about the behavior of others they often find that their predictions and explanations involve attributing emotions to those about w h o m they are reasoning. In this paper we discuss the internal models and representations w e have used to make machine reasoning of this kind possible. In doing so, we briefly sketch a simulated-world program called the Affective Reasoner. Elsewhere, we have discussed the Affective Reasoner's mechanisms for generating emotions in response to situations that impinge on an agent's concerns, for generating actions in response to emotions, and for reasoning about emotion episodes from cases [Elliott, 1992]. Here we give details about how agents in the Affective Reasoner model each other's point of view for both the purpose of reasoning about one another's emotion-based actions, and for "having" emotions about the fortunes (good or bad) of others (i.e., feeling sorry for someone, feeling happy for them, resenting their good fortune, or gloating over their bad fortune). T o do this, agents maintain Concernsof- Oihers representations (COOs) to establish points of view for other agents, and use cases to reason about those agents' expressions of emotions.