The Cognition and Affect Project at the University of Birmingham, the brain-child of professors Aaron Sloman and Glyn Humphreys, is a well-established line of research into comprehensive models of artificial human-like minds. One major thrust of the research over the years has centered on the role that processes most typically associated with emotion states take in intelligence and social intentionality. The work is of great breadth, encompassing, e.g., control strategies for resource-limited agents, hybrid architectures (e.g., symbolic, neural, genetic) that account for different layers of responsiveness to the environment, systems for pragmatic control of attention, and even reflections on the true nature of grief in an intelligent being. If a central theme can be ventured for this diverse group of researchers, it might be that most are attempting to build intellectually satisfying models that account for the many anomalies of real affect and intelligence.
There is a cognition and affect mailing list sponsored by the group,
and a window into the work can be had at
(http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/ 
axs/cog_affect/sim_agent.html)
The group has a Pop-11 based toolkit for the development of simulated agents which has been used for a number of projects. The toolkit supports the software description of agents that have inherent parallelism: both between distinct agents, but also between subsystems within an agent. Furthermore, the toolkit is designed to allow for appropriately low-level descriptions of, e.g., perception systems, and also higher level descriptions of, e.g., deliberation. Emotions within this paradigm may be seen as arising somewhat ``naturally'' through meta-management conflicts concerning the various resource-limited subsystems. An example application is the Minder agents which are purely reactive in nature but exhibit properties of social cooperation.