Computational Approaches to Emotional Modeling

Emotion is a concept that is very familiar to all of us but has been proven to be hard to define, not only to other people but also through artificial systems. There are many approaches to modeling emotions, some of them theoretical/qualitative and some of them computational. It is hard to integrate qualitative models into empirical studies, as the concepts they define are hard to measure. On the other hand, computational models are usually developed for practical purposes and do not comprehensively describe emotions; which makes them suitable in applied fields but not when probing the nature of emotions. Based on earlier work, we argue that it is possible to develop an emotion model that is both quantitative and comprehensive. Here, we talk about existing connections between emotions and mathematical theories: information theory, game theory, set theory, dynamical systems and hope to inspire future research on mathematics based comprehensive emotion models.