Towards Human–Robot Affective Co-evolution Overcoming Oppositions in Constructing Emotions and Empathy

This article deals with contemporary research aimed at building emotional and empathic robots, and gives an overview of the field focusing on its main characteristics and ongoing transformations. It interprets the latter as precursors to a paradigmatic transition that could significantly change our social ecologies. This shift consists in abandoning the classical view of emotions as essentially individual states, and developing a relational view of emotions, which, as we argue, can create genuinely new emotional and empathic processes—dynamics of “human–robot” affective coordination supporting the development of mixed (human–robot) ecologies.