Emotion as a Significant Change in Neural Activity

Abstract

It is hypothesised here that there exist two classes of emotions; driving and satisfying emotions. Driving emotions significantly increase the internal activity of the brain and result in the agent seeking to minimise its emotional state by performing actions that it would not otherwise do. Satisfying emotions decrease internal activity and encourage the agent to continue its current behaviour to maintain its emotional state. It is theorised that neuromodulators act as simple yet high impact signals to either agitate or calm specific neural networks. This results in what we can define as either driving or satisfying emotions. The plausibility of this hypothesis is tested in this paper using feed-forward networks of leaky integrate-and-fire neurons.