  Affective computing has proven to be a viable field of research comprised of
a large number of multidisciplinary researchers resulting in work that is
widely published. The majority of this work consists of computational models of
emotion recognition, computational modeling of causal factors of emotion and
emotion expression through rendered and robotic faces. A smaller part is
concerned with modeling the effects of emotion, formal modeling of cognitive
appraisal theory and models of emergent emotions. Part of the motivation for
affective computing as a field is to better understand emotional processes
through computational modeling. One of the four major topics in affective
computing is computers that have emotions (the others are recognizing,
expressing and understanding emotions). A critical and neglected aspect of
having emotions is the experience of emotion (Barrett, Mesquita, Ochsner, and
Gross, 2007): what does the content of an emotional episode look like, how does
this content change over time and when do we call the episode emotional. Few
modeling efforts have these topics as primary focus. The launch of a journal on
synthetic emotions should motivate research initiatives in this direction, and
this research should have a measurable impact on emotion research in
psychology. I show that a good way to do so is to investigate the psychological
core of what an emotion is: an experience. I present ideas on how the
experience of emotion could be modeled and provide evidence that several
computational models of emotion are already addressing the issue.
