Who Needs Emotions? The Brain Meets the Robot

334 conclusions
handout and pleased that I was only a few minutes late. I was looking
forward to the meeting and experienced no regret or frustration
that it had been postponed the day before. However, when I arrived
at about 4:06, N’s secretary wasn’t there and neither was N. Another
secretary explained that N’s secretary had left a message for
me earlier in the day to move the meeting forward to 2:30. (I had
not received the message because my secretary had taken the day
off to tend to her ill mother. When I heard the news that morning,
I felt slightly frustrated that some correspondence would be delayed
but equally concerned for the mother’s health and had no question
about the appropriateness of my secretary’s action. The matter,
having been accepted, had no further effect upon my mood, at least
until I learned of the loss of the message. At midday, I had been
transiently and mildly upset by the cancellation of a luncheon appointment.)
N was not available. Would I care to make an appointment?
With a curt “No,” I turned on my heels, and stormed out of
the office and back to my own. As I walked, I simultaneously felt
fury at the double cancellation and shame at my own rude behavior,
as well as realizing that another appointment had to be made. I
felt tight and constricted. After a minute or two in my office, unable
to concentrate and with my thoughts dominated by this stew
of emotions, I decided to return to N’s office. Once there, I apologized
to the secretary for my discourtesy, explained the annoyance
of the double cancellation, set a new appointment, made a feeble
joke in the form of a threat about the dire consequences of another
cancellation, and then returned to my office. The physiological effects
I had felt just a few minutes earlier quickly dissipated. I felt
pleased that I had “done the right thing.”
In this particular instance, no real harm was done. In other cases, my
shows of temper have triggered unfortunate effects in others slower to anger
and slower to forgive, which have had long-lasting consequences. I say this
not to confess my faults or engender curiosity about my autobiography but
simply to make the point, almost entirely neglected elsewhere in this book,
that emotions can have negative consequences (cf. Chapter 10, “Emotional
disturbances,” of Hebb, 1949). 1 Thus my warning, “Beware the Passionate
Robot.” If we create a computer tutor, it may be useful to provide it with a
human-like voice and perhaps even a face that can provide emotional inflections
to its delivery of information, thus adding a human-like emollient
that may aid the human student’s learning. However, if the computer were
to become so exasperated with a poor student that it could lose its temper,
screaming out the student’s shortcomings in emotional tones laced with in-