Modeling Culturally and Emotionally Affected Behavior

Abstract

Culture and emotions have a profound impact on human behavior. Consequently, high-fidelity simulated interactive environments (e.g., trainers and computer games) that involve virtual humans must model socio-cultural and emotional effects on agent behavior. In this paper we discuss two recently fielded systems that do so independently: Culturally Affected Behavior (CAB) and EMotion and Adaptation (EMA). We then propose a simple language that combines the two systems in a natural way thereby enabling simultaneous simulation of culturally and emotionally affected behavior. The proposed language is based on matrix algebra and can be easily implemented on single- or multi-core hardware with an off-the-shelf matrix package (e.g., MATLAB or a C++ library). We then show how to extend the combined culture and emotion model with an explicit representation of religion and personality profiles.