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The idea of robotic companions capable of establishing meaningful relationships with humans remains far from being accomplished. To achieve this, robots must interact with people in natural ways, employing social mechanisms that people use while interacting with each other. One such mechanism is empathy, often seen as the basis of social cooperation and prosocial behaviour. We argue that artificial companions capable of behaving in an empathic manner, which involves the capacity to recognise another's affect and respond appropriately, are more successful at establishing and maintaining a positive relationship with users. This paper presents a study where an autonomous robot with empathic capabilities acts as a social companion to two players in a chess game. The robot reacts to the moves played on the chessboard by displaying several facial expressions and verbal utterances, showing empathic behaviours towards one player and behaving neutrally towards the other. Quantitative and qualitative results of 31 participants indicate that users towards whom the robot behaved empathically perceived the robot as friendlier, which supports our hypothesis that empathy plays a key role in human-robot interaction.

The idea of autonomous social robots capable of assisting us in our daily lives is becoming more real every day. However, there are still many open issues regarding the social capabilities that those robots should have in order to make daily interactions with humans more natural. For example, the role of affective interactions is still unclear. This paper presents an ethnographic study conducted in an elementary school where 40 children interacted with a social robot capable of recognising and responding empathically to some of the children's affective states. The findings suggest that the robot's empathic behaviour affected positively how children perceived the robot. However, the empathic behaviours should be selected carefully, under the risk of having the opposite effect. The target application scenario and the particular preferences of children seem to influence the "degree of empathy" that social robots should be endowed with.

Given the recent advances in robot and synthetic character technology, many researchers are now focused on ways of establishing social relations between these agents and humans over long periods of time. Early studies have shown that the novelty effect of robots and agents quickly wears out and that people change their attitudes and preferences towards them over time. In this paper, we study the role of social presence in long-term human-robot interactions. We conducted a study where children played chess exercises with a social robot over a five week period. With this experiment, we identified possible key issues that should be considered when designing social robots for long-term interactions.

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Affect sensitivity is an important requirement for artificial companions to be capable of engaging in social interaction with human users. This paper provides a general overview of some of the issues arising from the design of an affect recognition framework for artificial companions. Limitations and challenges are discussed with respect to other capabilities of companions and a real world scenario where an iCat robot plays chess with children is presented. In this scenario, affective states that a robot companion should be able to recognise are identified and the non-verbal behaviours that are affected by the occurrence of these states in the children are investigated. The experimental results aim to provide the foundation for the design of an affect recognition system for a game companion: in this interaction scenario children tend to look at the iCat and smile more when they experience a positive feeling and they are engaged with the iCat.