Rudimentary moods for agents in the AR can result from an emotion, or series of emotions. To make use of this mechanism, it has been necessary to specify several granularities of mood. General mood biasing factors (such as valence-bias) tend to be automatically generated by the simulation as a result of emotions, whereas more specific mood factors (such as depression-anxiety) tend to be hand-coded as a result of specific situations. When values for more specific mood-biasing variables are present, they are preferred over those for more general mood-biasing variables.
In our model, anxiety and depression interact to form distinct valence biases. For example a non-depressed, non-anxious, agent will react in a way which is biased towards positive anxiety-relevant traits (e.g., ``assurance'') while an anxious agent will have a bias towards negative anxiety-relevant traits (e.g., ``tension''), and a depressed agent will have the bias removed entirely. As such, depression may have the effect, in the model, of dulling an agent's usual anxious nervousness (e.g., a depression-induced representation of ``it just doesn't matter'').
To illustrate, let us suppose that in a simulation an agent is ``fired from her job.'' This agent's concerns lead to both sadness over the loss of comfortable circumstances and companions (stemming from the blockage of some career and social goals), and fear over the prospects of future financial hardship (stemming from the prospect of a financial goal being blocked). If we raise the prior value of her ``anxiety'' (by giving anxiety-invincibility a negative bias and increasing its value), the predominant emotion becomes fear, (``How am I going to pay the rent?''). Raising her prior level of ``depression'' (by giving depression-ecstasy a negative bias and increasing its value) mediates her fear but increases her sadness, (``Everything just seems to be going wrong!'').
Similarly, if a non-depressed, non-anxious, simulated agent is ``involved in a successful business deal,'' the agent might ordinarily be predisposed to attain an ``undue'' intensity of pride from the event (as non-depressives often have an inflated sense of self-involvement in positive causal interactions [Vasquez1987]), while depression would temper this effect, and anxiety would provoke the agent to fear the deal's consequences.