Empathy for Artificial Agents

The paper has three goals. First, it introduces into different notions of empathy and related capacities such as emotional contagion, affective empathy, cognitive empathy, and sympathy. Second, it presents a case in point of an intelligent tutoring system, Affective AutoTutor, whose affect-sensitive behavior seems to further and enhance the outcome of its interactions with its students. Affective AutoTutor appears to behave empathically within a well defined learning environment. Third, attention is directed towards the requirements to be met by artificial empathizers to be judged as empathizers tout court by their social interactants, even when acting in unspecified social situations. To be a convincing empathizer, the artificial agent would not only need to grasp the emotional states of its interaction partners and understand their situation with respect to an adequate world model, but also communicate its own affective states. Eventually, an artificial empathizer should be ready to react appropriately to its interaction partner’s reciprocal empathy.

[1]  Ana Paiva,et al.  Social Robots for Long-Term Interaction: A Survey , 2013, International Journal of Social Robotics.

[2]  Arthur C. Graesser,et al.  AutoTutor and affective autotutor: Learning by talking with cognitively and emotionally intelligent computers that talk back , 2012, TIIS.

[3]  A. Stephan.  Emotions, Existential Feelings, and Their Regulation , 2012 .

[4]  P. Griffiths,et al.  Don’t Give Up on Basic Emotions , 2011 .

[5]  Fuji Ren,et al.  Needs and challenges of care robots in nursing care setting: A literature review , 2010, Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Natural Language Processing and Knowledge Engineering(NLPKE-2010).

[6]  Peter Goldie,et al.  Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives , 2011 .

[7]  Ruth Aylett,et al.  Empathic Interaction with a Virtual Guide , 2005 .

[8]  Ana Paiva,et al.  Empathic Robots for Long-term Interaction , 2014, Int. J. Soc. Robotics.

[9]  Arthur C. Graesser,et al.  Human or Computer? AutoTutor in a Bystander Turing Test , 2002, Intelligent Tutoring Systems.

[10]  Martin Buss,et al.  Increasing Helpfulness towards a Robot by Emotional Adaption to the User , 2013, International Journal of Social Robotics.

[11]  Hauke R. Heekeren,et al.  Lack of empathy in patients with narcissistic personality disorder , 2011, Psychiatry Research.

[12]  Amy Coplan,et al.  Understanding Empathy:Its Features and Effects , 2011 .

[13]  Nikola Kompa,et al.  Sprache, sprachliche Bedeutung, Sprachverstehen und Kontext , 2013 .

[14]  Peter Goldie,et al.  EmpathyPhilosophical and Psychological Perspectives , 2011 .

[15]  A. Stephan,et al.  Emotions beyond brain and body , 2014 .

[16]  Haizhou Li,et al.  Making Social Robots More Attractive: The Effects of Voice Pitch, Humor and Empathy , 2013, Int. J. Soc. Robotics.

[17]  C. Batson,et al.  Distress and empathy: two qualitatively distinct vicarious emotions with different motivational consequences. , 1987, Journal of personality.

[18]  P. Ekman.  An argument for basic emotions , 1992 .

[19]  Stephen Darwall.  Empathy, Sympathy, Care , 1998 .

[20]  S. Preston,et al.  Empathy: Its ultimate and proximate bases. , 2001, The Behavioral and brain sciences.

[21]  Guy Gouardères,et al.  Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems , 2002 .

[22]  Henrik Walter,et al.  Social Cognitive Neuroscience of Empathy: Concepts, Circuits, and Genes , 2012 .

[23]  Oliver T Wolf,et al.  Dissociation of Cognitive and Emotional Empathy in Adults with Asperger Syndrome Using the Multifaceted Empathy Test (MET) , 2008, Journal of autism and developmental disorders.

[24]  Rosalind W. Picard,et al.  Affective Computing and Autism , 2006, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.