The urge theory, that has been developed by the author, intends to achieve a comprehensive model of human emotion, cognition, and individual and social behaviors. Any model that pursues as remote a goal as this has to employ, as a means to its verification, computational formalizations of whatever parts of the theory that allow them. In this paper, a few possibilities of such partial computational formalization are demonstrated, even though none of them is hardly complete as yet.
The urge theory starts with an explication of emotions. Because of the inherent ambiguity of the everyday notion of emotions, the theroy introduces three basic concepts of its own: urge activity plan, mood-state, and emotional attitude. The major content of this paper consists of, first laying foundational remarks on these three major concepts, and then going on somewhat more in detail to discuss appraisal, attention and the structure of the urge activity plan. With this last topic, a new concept, the versatile system structure, an elaboration of the idea used by Minsky in his Society of the Mind model, is introduced.
