The emergence and maintenance of co-operation in a society of agents is an important issue and some recent research has explored the role that can be played by a functional model of emotions. For example, it has been shown that the emotions of gratitude and anger can be used to produce co-operative behaviour in a public goods game from agents acting solely in accordance with their current emotional state. The effectiveness of these emotions in producing co-operation depends on the emotional

more »

... tility of the agents, which determines the strength of these emotions required to alter behaviour. Often, however, dysfunctional relationships develop, which impairs the performance of the society as a whole. In this paper we explore through a series of computational simulations how interventions by society can be used to correct dysfunctional behaviour. The results of our simulations show that enforcement of co-operative behaviour and education to alter emotional characters can improve overall performance in the dysfunctional cases and that different interventions are appropriate given different initial circumstances.