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A Mini-survey on Psychological Pillars of Empathy for Social Robots: Self-Awareness, Theory of Mind, and Perspective Taking

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Abstract

Recent studies in the field of Human–Robot Interaction (HRI) confirm the positive effects of robots’ empathic behaviors in HRI. Most HRI studies investigating empathy, apply an empirical approach to implement empathy, i.e., the empathic model is derived directly from observations of empathic actions. This resulted in the emergence of numerous different empathic models that are only valid for a particular scenario that is highly tuned and, therefore, a slight modification in the scenario makes the corresponding empathy model infeasible. In fact, most of the proposed models suffer from a lack of generalizability. Since empathy is a complex concept that includes different dimensions, a coherent model of empathy that can be used in different scenarios or even be scenario independent, needs to consider several core concepts of empathy.Thus, the goal of this paper is to analyze and link different concepts of empathy and bring related existing models together, which can help researchers in the HRI community to have a better picture of an empathy model that might lead to the development of more general models of empathy for social robots.

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Data Availability

Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analyzed during the current paper.

Notes

  1. The effect of targets’ personality on their preferred empathic behaviors is also investigated in different studies, e.g., [15, 24, 51].

  2. Telling jokes and saying funny things.

  3. Making humor in stressful or adversity situations of life.

  4. Allowing others to make humor about oneself, and laughing along with others when being ridiculed or disparaged.

  5. Using humor to attack or tease other people.

  6. In general, the more the robot knows about the target, the more appropriate, accurate, and personalized will be its empathic behaviors.

  7. Another type of perceptual perspective taking is spatial perspective taking, which refers to the qualitative spatial location of objects (or agents) with respect to a frame [119].

  8. Can be considered as ToM.

  9. Can be considered as Perspective-taking.

  10. http://act-r.psy.cmu.edu/.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my colleague Oliver Roesler for our discussions and his valuable comments. I would also like to thank the reviewers for their helpful comments.

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    Elahe Bagheri

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Bagheri, E. A Mini-survey on Psychological Pillars of Empathy for Social Robots: Self-Awareness, Theory of Mind, and Perspective Taking. Int J of Soc Robotics 15, 1227–1241 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-023-01022-z

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