Emotional Appraisal of Moral Dilemma in Characters

In the narrative realm, emotions in general, and moral emotions in particular, play an important role in conveying moral values to the audience. A paradigmatic case is given by the occurrence of moral dilemmas in stories, where the character must trade off options that cannot be reconciled, each related with a certain moral value. In this paper, we propose a model of the appraisal of moral emotions, and describe an agent architecture that reacts to the occurrence of a moral dilemma with the appropriate emotions.