What a great title for a book, and a great subject: the brain, emotions and artificial intelligence. But at a $60 price tag, I'll hold out for Santa...or maybe my husband if he actually reads this blog.
I first heard about this book from Zack Lynch over at the Corante Brain Waves Blog. Here's an excerpt from his post: 
My book review of Who Needs Emotions? The Brain Meets the Robot is published this month in the Lancet Neurology. While copyrights hold me back from publishing the review here, I will say that the 499 page book is an important contribution to the field of emotional neurotechnology. It contains a stimulating collection of chapters from some of the most prominent neuroscientists and artificial intelligence experts around.
One of my favorite chapters was written by Ann E Kelley and focused on understanding how the brain processes emotions, how emotions evolved and the neurobiological substrates of emotions. I write, "Within the space of a few dozen pages, Kelley traverses evolutionary time and looks at the neurochemical networks encoding emotion and motivation. The role of dopamine in reward and plasticity, serotonin in aggression and depression and opioid peptides in pain and pleasure are discussed as critical neuromodulators that have given rise to an extraordinary amount of behavioral flexibility."
"So what about the robots? Researchers in artificial intelligence are interested in leveraging emotions to build systems that can perform unanticipated tasks in unpredictable environments. Despite the progress being made in these systems, most AI researchers concede that improved outcomes (of their models) will need better models of how human beings respond (in their emotional state) to new situations."
At the end of the day, I highly recommend the book for searchers and graduate students across neuroscience and computer science. - Zack Lynch
I'm drooling just reading the Amazon description:
Who Needs Emotions?: The Brain Meets the Robot (Series in Affective Science) (Hardcover)
by Jean-Marc Fellous (Editor), Michael A. Arbib (Editor)
The idea that some day robots may have emotions has captured the imagination of many and has been dramatized by robots and androids in such famous movies as 2001 Space Odyssey's HAL or Star Trek's Data. By contrast, the editors of this book have assembled a panel of experts in neuroscience and artificial intelligence who have dared to tackle the issue of whether robots can have emotions from a purely scientific point of view.
The study of the brain now usefully informs study of the social, communicative, adaptive, regulatory, and experimental aspects of emotion and offers support for the idea that we exploit our own psychological responses in order to feel others' emotions.
The contributors show the many ways in which the brain can be analyzed to shed light on emotions. Fear, reward, and punishment provide structuring concepts for a number of investigations. Neurochemistry reveals the ways in which different "neuromodulators" such as serotonin, dopamine, and opioids can affect the emotional valence of the brain.
And studies of different regions such as the amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex provide a view of the brain as a network of interacting subsystems. Related studies in artificial intelligence and robotics are discussed and new multi-level architectures are proposed that make it possible for emotions to be implemented.
It is now an accepted task in robotics to build robots that perceive human expressions of emotion and can "express" simulated emotions to ease interactions with humans. Looking towards future innovations, some scientists posit roles for emotion with our fellow humans. All of these issues are covered in this timely and stimulating book which is written for researchers and graduated students in neuroscience, cognitive science, psychology, robotics, and artificial intelligence.
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