www.people.cornell.edu/pages/edo1/.

The question is not whether intelligent machines can have any emotions, but whether machines can be intelligent without any emotions. – Marvin Minsky, (Minsky, 1986) p. 163 In every art form it is the emotional content that makes the difference between mere technical skill and true art.

Modern economic theory ignores the influence of emotions on decision-making. Emerging neuroscience evidence suggests that sound and rational decision making, in fact, depends on prior accurate emotional processing. The somatic marker hypothesis provides a systems-level neuroanatomical and cognitive framework for decision-making and its influence by emotion. The key idea of this hypothesis is that decision-making is a process that is influenced by marker signals that arise in bioregulatory processes, including those that express themselves in emotions and feelings. This influence can occur at multiple levels of operation, some of which occur consciously, and some of which occur non-consciously. Here we review studies that confirm various predictions from the hypothesis, and propose a neural model for economic decision, in which emotions are a major factor in the interaction between environmental conditions and human decision processes, with these emotional systems providing valuable implicit or explicit knowledge for making fast and advantageous decisions. © 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Who knows what I want to do? Who knows what anyone wants to do? How can you be sure about something like that? Isn't it all a question of brain chemistry, signals going back and forth, electrical energy in the cortex? How do you know whether something is really what you want to do or just some kind of nerve impulse in the brain. Some minor little activity takes place somewhere in this unimportant place in one of the brain hemispheres and suddenly I want to go to Montana or I don't want to go to Montana. (White Noise, Don DeLillo)

This paper presents ongoing work towards building an autonomous robot that learns in a social context. The mode of

In this paper we take the view that human-like response can only be yielded through a richly integrated humanoid system. By taking such a view, we have confined ourselves to pursue the development of a richly integrated humanoid system. In this paper we present our initial effort in this pursuit, we present a humanoid system -- an upper body humanoid robot -- with active real-time stereo vision, an auditory system for spatial hearing, and proprioceptive systems, with a high performance motor control system. The context in which we wish to establish our research is in the context of continuous humanoid interaction. Interaction with the environment, as well as interaction with people, all form part of this establishment. We present our approach to the problem of interacting with a continuum of multiple stimuli, while producing meaningful responses. We will show by using a relatively simple mechanism for integration, it is still possible to realise a vastly responsive system. Hence, providing a system that is adaptable through redundancy, and flexible for integration. Our presentation includes a new humanoid robot system currently being developed for complex continuous interaction. An example of our humanoid robot in continuous interaction is presented. The system is able to track a person by sight in an unmodified environment, perform real-time mimicking of the upper body motion of the person, track a sound source (spatial orientation), and physical handling of the system in a compliance manner is also allowed. Each of the sub-systems of our humanoid is also introduced, with experimental results of each presented. 1

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Ever since William James, psychologists of emotion have tended to view affective states as intrinsically conscious. We argue that nonconscious affect also exists, and focus specifically on the possibility of unconscious ``liking''. We present evidence that positive and negative affective reactions can be elicited subliminally, while a person is completely unaware of any affective reaction at all �in addition to being unaware of the causal stimulus). Despite the absence of any detectable subjective experience of emotion, subliminally induced unconscious ``liking' ' can influence later consumption behaviour. We suggest that unconscious ``liking' ' is mediated by specific subcortical brain systems, such as the nucleus accumbens and its connections. Ordinarily, conscious liking �feelings of pleasure) results from the interaction of separate brain systems of conscious awareness with those core processes of unconscious affect. But under some conditions, activity in brain systems mediating unconscious core ``liking' ' may become decoupled from conscious awareness. The result is a genuinely unconscious emotion. We begin with apologies to William James for having stolen the title of our paper from his classic article, ``What is an emotion' ' �James, 1884). Worse still, by inserting ``unconscious' ' as a modifier, our title distorts his concept of emotion in a way that renders it almost nonsensical. This is because an unconscious emotion was a contradiction in terms, according to James ' �1884) definition. For James, emotion was a conscious experience or subjective feeling

What are the brain and cognitive systems that allow humans to play baseball, compute square roots, cook soufflés, or navigate the Tokyo subways? It may seem that studies of human infants and of non-human animals will tell us little about these abilities, because only educated, enculturated human adults engage in organized games, formal mathematics, gourmet cooking, or map-reading. In this chapter, we argue against this seemingly sensible conclusion. When human adults exhibit complex, uniquely human, culture-specific skills, they draw on a set of psychological and neural mechanisms with two distinctive properties: they evolved before humanity and thus are shared with other animals, and they emerge early in human development and thus are common to infants, children, and adults. These core knowledge systems form the building blocks for uniquely human skills. Without them we wouldn’t be able to learn about different kinds of games, mathematics, cooking, or maps. To understand what is special about human intelligence, therefore, we must study both the core knowledge systems on which it rests and the mechanisms by which these systems are orchestrated to permit new kinds of concepts and cognitive processes. What is core knowledge? A wealth of research on non-human primates and on human

We explore the role of negative relationships in the context of social networks in work organizations. Though network researchers have emphasized the benefits and opportunities derived from positive interpersonal relationships, we examine the social liabilities that can result from negative relationships in order to flesh out the entire “social ledger. ” We define a negative relationship as an enduring, recurring set of negative judgments, feelings, and behavioral intentions towards another person – one person dislikes another. We identify the factors that lead to negative relationships in the workplace as well as factors that may moderate the relationship between negative relationships and individuals ’ task and socioemotional outcomes. We argue that these negative relationships may have greater power than positive relationships to explain workplace outcomes. We derive our argument from theory and research on negative asymmetry. Negative Relationships in Networks 3 “A man’s stature is determined by his enemies, not his friends. ”-- Al Pacino, City Hall Employees in organizations are embedded in social networks that can provide opportunities and benefits such as job attainment, job satisfaction, performance, salary, power, and promotions