Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
Path: gmd.de!ira.uka.de!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!spool.mu.edu!uwm.edu!linac!uchinews!machine!chinet!jorn
From: jorn@chinet.chi.il.us (Jorn Barger)
Subject: "Was: barger@ils"  Chapter 2 (Emotions)
Message-ID: <C0xto7.Eoy@chinet.chi.il.us>
Organization: Chinet - Public Access UNIX
Date: Sat, 16 Jan 1993 08:16:54 GMT
Lines: 117


====================================================================
                        "Was: Barger@ILS"
                   (memoirs of an a.i. hacker)
                          by Jorn Barger

                  Chapter 2: Ortony on Emotions
====================================================================

Very likely if I hadn't gotten in on the ground floor of ILS the way I
did, months before it officially existed, my job-application would have
disappeared in the first cut, because I have no degree, and all my
experience had been in videogame conversions.  In their first months ILS
was doing a lot of hiring, with not a lot of advance public notice.  So I
was in the right place at the right time... but I have to give Schank
credit for taking a chance on me.

In my approach letter I was totally outspoken about my sense of Schank's
work as 'on target' in a unique way... which surely helped my chances! 
What I came to understand in those first weeks was that Schank's "scruffy
school" of AI saw themselves as a fairly lonely island of story-content-
savvy realism in a desolate sea of "straight", math-and-logic-oriented AI. 
(I wonder now if there aren't other factors contributing to that
communications gap.  Be aware that I see myself as a post-Schank Schankian
-- I consider that Schank himself is Schankian AI's worst enemy!)

At that time (Sept 1989), ILS had about 50 people-- faculty, grads,
programmers, and admin.  Schank's PR-image for ILS has been that they are
"trying to fix the schools" by building educational software that better
fits the natural ways students learn.   Most of ILS's financing comes from
corporate sponsors like Arthur Andersen accounting, who spend such huge
sums on training their employees that they can afford to risk a few
million more on fairly basic research.

The first encouraging connection I made at ILS was with Andrew Ortony,
who'd just published (with Clore and Collins) "The Cognitive Structure of
Emotions" (about $12 paper from Cambridge U.P.).  I love typologies, and
the emotions-typology in this book is certainly the only one I've ever
seen that shows real, careful analytic thinking, identifying several
distinctly "orthogonal" dimensions.  Ortony et al. (aka OCC) sort emotions
into three superclasses-- event-oriented, person-oriented, and thing-
oriented:

Emotions about things: liking, disliking.

Emotions about persons: approving, disapproving.
         about self:  pride, shame.
         about others: admiration, reproach.

Emotions about events for self: pleasing, displeasing.
                      for other: gloating, pity, resentment, happy-for.   
    about events in the future:  hope, fear.
                 realized (positive): satisfaction, relief.
                 realized (negative): disappointment, fears-confirmed.
(This last is a nice instance of a 'new' emotion predicted by theory, like
the positron in particle physics.)

Emotions about another person's role in events: gratitude, anger.
         about self's role: 'gratification', remorse.

We were conscious of the narrow gap between this theory, and (in
particular) Chris Crawford's "Trust and Betrayal: the legacy of Siboot",
built around a little society of creatures who approve and disapprove of
each other's actions.  (Siboot was also held up around ILS as an enviable
implementation of the inverse-parser concept: you can build sentences in
that game from elegant iconic menus.  Crawford is selling the source for
$150 but I haven't seen it yet.  You can get his address from the r.a.i-f
FAQ.)  Ortony's student Clark Elliott has since implemented a microworld
of hot-tempered taxidrivers using this analysis.  You can order his thesis
as an ILS tech report-- see below.

So here, clearly, was one little piece towards the 'inventory of human
histories' that I was after.  Ortony wanted to follow up the 'cognitive'
theory of emotions with a look at the 'affective' side:  given that what
emotions we *feel* depends on such factors as approval and anticipation,
was a similar analysis possible of *how one acts* in consequence of each
emotion?  We were looking at categories like what sounds and movements
you'd tend to make, where your thoughts would be directed, etc.  But at
this point we drifted apart, and I'm not sure where that work stands now. 
I don't think Ortony has taken the step of asking, for each emotional
category, what are the usual 'human histories' it plays a role in, which
is where I'd like to see him go.

Andrew sees himself as a psychologist, which automatically sets of danger
alarms for me-- one alternative way of posing the 'inventory of human
histories' question is to ask:  What will be the section-headings in the
ideal psychology text of the future?  I consider that the current cluster
of paradigms that pass for 'scientific' psychology are hopelessly bogged
down in jargon and speciously imitative 'scientistic' methodology, and
anybody who tries to conform to those standards is just wasting good
brainpower.  I expect to see that whole realm cannibalized from without by
survival-of-the-fittest among interactive fictions.

(Imagine an IF-development environment sophisticated enough that you
could, eg, feed in the ethical codes of every sort of human philosopher,
letting you explore the stories that result when they interact!  Now
*that* I'd be proud to call psychology!)


I'll be referring to several ILS tech reports in coming chapters.  They're
free to academics, and just a few dollars each for the rest of us. 
Requests go to Elizabeth Brasher-Brown, 1890 Maple Avenue,
Evanston, IL  60201, or by email at:  brown@ils.nwu.edu

Recommended (or scheduled for discussion, anyway):

Kolodner & Jona: Case-Based Reasoning: an overview
Schank & Osgood et al: A Content Theory of Memory Indexing
Schank, Ferguson, Birnbaum, Barger, & Greising: Ask Tom

and the TaxiWorld thesis:
Elliott: The Affective Reasoner

[Next chapter: LISP and CBR]

Jorn Barger  jorn@chinet.chi.il.us   (was: barger@ils.nwu.edu)
(still breathin...)
