Emotion Contagion among Affective Agents Issues and Discussion

Emotional contagion is a mechanism which results in transferring an emotion from one person to another; in fact, it has been proven to be one of the key factors in successful crowd managing and preserving an amiable working atmosphere. However, believable simulation of a group of people with social links amongst them requires not only complex interaction models but also complex internal models as well. This paper describes the progress of an on-going research that explores and simulates various types of emotions while they are being transmitted amongst affective intelligent agents that are connected in simulated social structure. The internal mechanism of agents is based on affective agent architectures while the contagion and its rules are being modelled by using tools from graph theory.