Survey and Perspective on Social Emotions in Robotics

TL;DR

This paper reviews research on social emotions in robotics, highlighting psychological foundations, current studies, and future directions for implementing higher-level social emotions in socially aware robots.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive survey of social emotions in psychology, neuroscience, and robotics, and discusses future research directions for integrating social emotions into robots.

Findings

Social emotions are less studied but crucial for next-generation robots.

Current robotics research mainly focuses on basic emotions, with limited work on social emotions.

Future directions include implementing social emotions for more socially aware robots.

Abstract

This study reviews research on social emotions in robotics. In robotics, the study of emotions has been pursued for a long time, including the study of their recognition, expression, and computational modeling of the basic mechanisms which underlie them. Research has advanced according to well-known psychological findings, such as category and dimension theories. Many studies have been based on these basic theories, addressing only basic emotions. However, social emotions, also referred to as higher-level emotions, have been studied in psychology. We believe that these higher-level emotions are worth pursuing in robotics for next-generation, socially aware robots. In this review paper, we summarize the findings on social emotions in psychology and neuroscience, along with a survey of the studies on social emotions in robotics that have been conducted to date. Thereafter, research directions toward the implementation of social emotions in robots are discussed.