The Embodiment of Synthetic Emotion

Emotions are fundamentally embodied phenomena - but what exactly does this mean? And how is embodiment relevant for synthetic emotion? The specific role of embodied processes in the organisation of cognition and behaviour in biological systems is too complex to analyse without abstracting away the vast majority of variables. Robotic approaches have thus ignored physiological processes. At most, they hypothesise that homeostatic processes play a role in the cognitive economy of the agent – “gut feeling” is the embodied phenomenon to be modelled. Physiological processes play an actual role in the control of behaviour and interaction dynamics beyond information-processing. In this chapter, the authors introduce a novel approach to emotion synthesis based on the notion of morphofunctionality: the capacity to modulate the function of subsystems, changing the overall functionality of the system. Morphofunctionality provides robots with the capacity to control action readiness, and this in turn is a fundamental phenomenon for the emergence of emotion.