On Computational Models of Emotion Regulation and Their Applications Within HCI

Emotion regulation, or the ability to regulate one’s own and other people’s emotions, is an important skill for human beings, enabling them to function adequately in their social environment. The development of computational models of emotion regulation opens up a range of interesting applications in human–computer interaction, varying from virtual characters to simulation-based training systems. To provide more insight in the underlying mechanisms as well as the application areas of computational emotion regulation models, the current chapter provides an overview of the state-of-the-art in this area. After briefly reviewing the psychological literature on emotion generation and regulation, I will explain how these phenomena can be formalized into computational models. Next, a computational model of emotion regulation is presented in detail, and a number of resulting simulation runs are shown. The chapter concludes with a discussion of potential applications of such models.