This paper describes the emotion elicitation process of the Salt & Pepper architecture for autonomous agents. Its main contributions are a general framework upon which it is possible to define different theories of emotion generation, the view of artificial emotion as an adaptive mechanism that is designed at the level of the agent architecture, and use and the discussion of several emotion eliciting mechanisms with special emphasis on non-cognitive emotion generation processes. We propose to add emotion eliciting inhibition times to emotion eliciting rules in order to avoid the repeated generation of the same emotion due to the same circumstances. Finally, we propose the conditioned emotion eliciting chunk, which sequentially generates conditioned emotions. This new emotion eliciting structure is useful to initiate emotion processes in stereotypical situations in which the initiated emotion depends on the emotion that has previously been generated. Our experiments were done during the SAFIRA European Project.
