Emotion: Theoretical Investigations and Implications for Artificial Social Aggregates

One of the most pressing issues in the social sciences and in distributed artificial intelligence research is the micro-macro link that is the question of how individual action and social structure are interrelated. Besides others disciplines, sociological research has identified emotion as being a possible key component in this link. Unfortunately, sociological theories in question remain relatively basic, and do not refer to emotion research from other disciplines. We show that emotion theories and models from cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience, and computer science constitute a valuable, if not mandatory foundation for sociological issues in emotion research. We therefore present an integrated view on emotion. The goal is to relate specific micro-macro aspects of emotion theory with general sociological theories of societal structuration. This issue is briefly discussed in the context of an exemplifying multi-agent architecture.