Modeling Culturally and Emotionally Affected Behavior

Culture and emotions have a profound impact on human be-havior. Consequently, high-fidelity simulated interactive en-vironments (e.g., trainers and computer games) that involve virtual humans must model socio-cultural and emotional ef-fects 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 sys-tems in a natural way thereby enabling simultaneous simula-tion of culturally and emotionally affected behavior. The pro-posed 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 emo-tion model with an explicit representation of religion and per-sonality profiles.