Silicon sycophants: the effects of computers that flatter
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies
Caring for Agents and Agents that Care: Building Empathic Relations with Synthetic Agents
AAMAS '04 Proceedings of the Third International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems - Volume 1
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies - Special issue: Subtle expressivity for characters and robots
Establishing and maintaining long-term human-computer relationships
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI)
iCat: an animated user-interface robot with personality
Proceedings of the fourth international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems
Modeling and evaluating empathy in embodied companion agents
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies
iCat: an affective game buddy based on anticipatory mechanisms
Proceedings of the 7th international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems - Volume 3
A Survey of Affect Recognition Methods: Audio, Visual, and Spontaneous Expressions
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
Studies on Humanlike Robots --- Humanoid, Android and Geminoid
SIMPAR '08 Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Simulation, Modeling, and Programming for Autonomous Robots
Using anticipation to create believable behaviour
AAAI'06 Proceedings of the 21st national conference on Artificial intelligence - Volume 1
Effects of (in)accurate empathy and situational valence on attitudes towards robots
Proceedings of the 5th ACM/IEEE international conference on Human-robot interaction
Expressive robots in education: varying the degree of social supportive behavior of a robotic tutor
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
"Why can't we be friends? " an empathic game companion for long-term interaction
IVA'10 Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Intelligent virtual agents
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The idea of robotic companions capable of establishing meaningful relationships with humans remains far from being accomplished. To achieve this, robots must interact with people in natural ways, employing social mechanisms that people use while interacting with each other. One such mechanism is empathy, often seen as the basis of social cooperation and prosocial behaviour. We argue that artificial companions capable of behaving in an empathic manner, which involves the capacity to recognise another's affect and respond appropriately, are more successful at establishing and maintaining a positive relationship with users. This paper presents a study where an autonomous robot with empathic capabilities acts as a social companion to two players in a chess game. The robot reacts to the moves played on the chessboard by displaying several facial expressions and verbal utterances, showing empathic behaviours towards one player and behaving neutrally towards the other. Quantitative and qualitative results of 31 participants indicate that users towards whom the robot behaved empathically perceived the robot as friendlier, which supports our hypothesis that empathy plays a key role in human-robot interaction.