Modeling Emotions and Feelings with Quantum Circuits

Emotions play an important role in human cognition. With the development of affective computing, there is an increasing number of studies on building emotional machines. However, today's machines are far from having emotional feelings, which are the very nature of emotions. To address this issue, we propose a quantum circuit model of emotions and feelings based on quantum theory. In this model, an emotion is always accompanied by a feeling, and their simultaneity is modeled by quantum entanglement. In addition, mixed emotions are modeled as quantum superposition states and the generation of a specific emotion is regarded as the result of quantum collapse by measurement which can be seen as cognitive activities. Experimental results on the IBM quantum simulation platform demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed model, suggesting that quantum computing is a promising way to create genuine emotional machines.