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Towards Human–Robot Affective Co-evolution Overcoming Oppositions in Constructing Emotions and Empathy

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Abstract

This article deals with contemporary research aimed at building emotional and empathic robots, and gives an overview of the field focusing on its main characteristics and ongoing transformations. It interprets the latter as precursors to a paradigmatic transition that could significantly change our social ecologies. This shift consists in abandoning the classical view of emotions as essentially individual states, and developing a relational view of emotions, which, as we argue, can create genuinely new emotional and empathic processes—dynamics of “human–robot” affective coordination supporting the development of mixed (human–robot) ecologies.

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Notes

  1. Italics are ours.

  2. Pre-defined in the sense that the emotional states exist prior to their expression.

  3. Our previous works can be considered the theoretical basis of this article, which applies the philosophical model of emotion and the reflections on developmental and social robotics presented in [7–9] to the issue of the separation, within contemporary robotics of emotion, between the “external” and “internal” aspects of emotions and empathy, and between the related research domains.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ESARG (Epistemology of the Sciences of the Artificial Research Group), CERCO (Center for Research on Complex Systems), University of Bergamo, Bergamo, Italy

    Luisa Damiano

  2. Graduate School of Core Ethics and Frontier Sciences, Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan

    Paul Dumouchel

  3. iCub Facility, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Genoa, Italy

    Hagen Lehmann

Authors
  1. Luisa Damiano
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  2. Paul Dumouchel
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  3. Hagen Lehmann
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Correspondence to Luisa Damiano.

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Damiano, L., Dumouchel, P. & Lehmann, H. Towards Human–Robot Affective Co-evolution Overcoming Oppositions in Constructing Emotions and Empathy. Int J of Soc Robotics 7, 7–18 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-014-0258-7

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