Abstract
For robots to become our personal companions in the future, they need to know how to socially interact with us. One defining characteristic of human social behaviour is empathy. In this paper, we present a robot that acts as a social companion expressing different kinds of empathic behaviours through its facial expressions and utterances. The robot comments the moves of two subjects playing a chess game against each other, being empathic to one of them and neutral towards the other. The results of a pilot study suggest that users to whom the robot was empathic perceived the robot more as a friend.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Measuring friendship quality in late adolescents and young adults: Mcgill friendship questionnaires. Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science 31(1), 130–132 (1999)
Empathy: Its ultimate and proximate bases. The Behavioral and brain sciences 25(1), 1–72 (2002)
Bickmore, T., Picard, R.: Establishing and maintaining long-term human-computer relationships. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) 12(2), 327 (2005)
Brave, S., Nass, C., Hutchinson, K.: Computers that care: investigating the effects of orientation of emotion exhibited by an embodied computer agent. Int. J. Hum.-Comput. Stud. 62(2), 161–178 (2005)
Castellano, G., Leite, I., Pereira, A., Martinho, C., Paiva, A., McOwan, P.: It’s all in the game: Towards an affect sensitive and context aware game companion, pp. 1–8 (September 2009)
Cooper, B., Brna, P., Martins, A.: Effective affective in intelligent systems - building on evidence of empathy in teaching and learning. In: Paiva, A.C.R. (ed.) IWAI 1999. LNCS, vol. 1814, pp. 21–34. Springer, Heidelberg (2000)
Goldstein, A.P., Michaels, G.Y.: Empathy: development, training, and consequences / Arnold P. Goldstein, Gerald Y. Michaels. L. Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale (1985)
Hegel, F., Spexard, T., Vogt, T., Horstmann, G., Wrede, B.: Playing a different imitation game: Interaction with an Empathic Android Robot. In: Proc. 2006 IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids 2006), pp. 56–61 (2006)
Kidd, C., Breazeal, C.: Robots at home: Understanding long-term human-robot interaction. In: IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, IROS 2008, pp. 3230–3235. IEEE, Los Alamitos (2008)
Krebs, D.L.: Altruism: An examination of the concept and a review of the literature. Psychological Bulletin 73(4), 258–302 (1970)
Leite, I., Martinho, C., Pereira, A., Paiva, A.:icat: an affective game buddy based on anticipatory mechanisms. In: Padgham, L., Parkes, D.C., Müller, J., Parsons, S. (eds.) AAMAS, vol. (3), pp. 1229–1232. IFAAMAS (2008)
Paiva, A., Dias, J., Sobral, D., Aylett, R., Sobreperez, P., Woods, S., Zoll, C., Hall, L.E.: Caring for agents and agents that care: Building empathic relations with synthetic agents. In: AAMAS, pp. 194–201. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos (2004)
Prendinger, H., Ishizuka, M.: The Empathic Companion: a Character-Based Interface That Addresses Users’ Affective States. Applied Artificial Intelligence 19(3-4), 267–285 (2005)
Riek, L., Robinson, P.: Real-time empathy: Facial mimicry on a robot. In: Workshop on Affective Interaction in Natural Environments (AFFINE) at the International ACM Conference on Multimodal Interfaces (ICMI 2008). ACM, New York (2008)
Rodrigues, S., Mascarenhas, S., Dias, J., Paiva, A.: I can feel it too!: Emergent empathic reactions between synthetic characters. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Affective Computing & Intelligent Interaction, ACII (2009)
van Breemen, A., Yan, X., Meerbeek, B.: icat: An animated user-interface robot with personality. In: Proceedings of the Fourth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS 2005, pp. 143–144. ACM, New York (2005)
Wispé, L.: History of the concept of empathy. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1987)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 ICST Institute for Computer Science, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering
About this paper
Cite this paper
Pereira, A., Leite, I., Mascarenhas, S., Martinho, C., Paiva, A. (2011). Using Empathy to Improve Human-Robot Relationships. In: Lamers, M.H., Verbeek, F.J. (eds) Human-Robot Personal Relationships. HRPR 2010. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 59. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-19385-9_17
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-19385-9_17
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-19384-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-19385-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)