Inner Speech and Extended Consciousness: a Model based on Damasio's Theory of Emotions

Recently, the interest in robots capable of experiencing empathy and displaying emotions has grown. This trend can be attributed to the pervasive presence of robots in many environments, such as homes, offices, museums, and hospitals, that require more empathic and reliable human-machine relationships. Recent studies demonstrated that providing the robot with the ability to think aloud improves humans' trust in machines, as they can understand the underlying reasoning of the artifact, what conclusions it can draw, and why and how. This work integrates a robot's inner speech mechanism with Damasio's theory of emotions to make the robot functionally conscious of its emotional experience, leading to a computational model of Extended Consciousness, SUSAN (Self-dialogue Utility in Simulating Artificial Emotions). Damasio claims that emotions originate within the body and precede and influence the reasoning processes that make the person aware of them. According to his theory, Extended Consciousness refers to the humans' cognitive processes that make the humans themselves aware of the physiological experiences of emotions purged by an external stimulus. SUSAN models the bodily emotional experience and simulates the awareness of the emergent emotion by using inner speech. The model is presented, and the initial results related to a use case are discussed.