Towards Artificial Empathy

Abstract

The design of artificial empathy is one of the most essential issues in social robotics. This is because empathic interactions with ordinary people are needed to introduce robots into our society. Several attempts have been made for specific situations. However, such attempts have provided several limitations; thus, diminishing authenticity. The present article proposes "affective developmental robotics (hereafter, ADR)," which provides more authentic artificial empathy based on the concept of cognitive developmental robotics (hereafter, CDR). First, the evolution and development of empathy as revealed in neuroscience and biobehavioral studies are reviewed, moving from emotional contagion to envy and schadenfreude. These terms are then reconsidered from the ADR/CDR viewpoint, particularly along the developmental trajectory of self-other cognition. Next, a conceptual model of artificial empathy is proposed based on an ADR/CDR viewpoint and discussed with respect to several existing studies. Finally, a general discussion and proposals for addressing future issues are given.

Development of artificial empathy

“…However, their attempt did not accurately discriminate between these terms from a neuroscience and biobehavioral perspective. Asada published a more accurate review of artificial empathy (Asada, 2014b), based on reviews from neuroscience perspectives that include ontogeny, phylogeny, brain mechanisms, context, and psychopathology as outlined by Gonzalez-Liencresa et al (2013).…”

“…Empathic behaviors are thought to be learnt through social interactions with humans in the framework of (cognitive) developmental robotics (Lungarella et al, 2003;Asada et al, 2009). Asada et al (2009) hypothesized that affective development was a part of cognitive development, and with regard to affective aspects they argued "artificial sympathy" (Asada et al, 2012) and proposed classifying affective developmental robotics as part of cognitive developmental robotics to accurately design artificial empathy (Asada, 2014a,b).…”

“…Asada et al (2009) hypothesized that affective development was a part of cognitive development, and with regard to affective aspects they argued "artificial sympathy" (Asada et al, 2012) and proposed classifying affective developmental robotics as part of cognitive developmental robotics to accurately design artificial empathy (Asada, 2014a,b). Among the several issues argued in the previous review (Asada, 2014b), I focus on two aspects in designing the development of artificial empathy along with several possible approaches.…”

“…The next section provides a summary of the review (Asada, 2014b) beginning with emotional contagion to envy/schadenfreude, followed by an introduction to affective developmental robotics as an approach to the developmental design of artificial empathy. Next, a review and discussion on several approaches for two focused aspects of affective developmental robotics, emotional contagion in relation to motor mimicry and cognitive/affective aspects of empathy follow.…”

Exploiting the Robot Kinematic Redundancy for Emotion Conveyance to Humans as a Lower Priority Task

“…The increasing interest in Human-Robot Interaction and social robotics [4] has naturally lead to the question of whether robots should be endowed with emotions [11] and emphatic behaviours [3,43].…”