Emulating Empathy in Socially Assistive Robotics

Abstract

Evidence from psychology indicates that perceived empathy has a host of beneficial effects on attitudes and social behav-ior. Empathy plays a key role in patient-centered therapy, because it implies the apprehension of another’s inner world and a joint understanding of emotions. This paper is a short survey of main issues relating to empathy that hold relevance to robotics. We focus on the existing literature on empathy in social psychology, and discuss its possible role of empathy in socially assistive robotics, along with possible methodologies for emulating and embodying empathy on robotic systems.