A Character Model with Moral Emotions: Preliminary Evaluation

In literary and drama criticism, emotions, and moral emotions in particular, have been pointed out as one of characterizing features of stories. In this paper, we propose to model story characters as value-based emotional agents, who appraise their own and others' actions based on their desires and values, and feel the appropriate moral emotions in response to narrative situations that challenge their goals and values. In order to validate the appropriateness of the agent model for narrative characters, we ran an experiment with human participants aimed at comparing their expectations about characters' emotions with the predictions of the value-based model of emotional agent. The results of the experiment show that the participants' expectations meet the predictions of the model.