Social robots, moral emotions

Abstract

[EN]The affective revolution in Psychology has prod uced enough knowledge to impl ement abilities of emotional recognition and expression in robots. However, the em otional prototypes are still very basic, almost caricaturized ones. If the goal is constructing robots that respond flexibly, in order to fulfill market demands from different countries while respec ting the moral values implicit in the social behavior of their inhabitants, then these robots will have to be pr ogrammed attending to detailed descriptions of the emotional experiences that are considered relevant in the interaction context in which the robot is going to be put to work (e.g., assisting people with cognitive or motor disabilities). The advantages of this approach are illustrated with an empirical study on contempt, the seventh basic emotion in Ekman’s theory, and one of the “rediscovered” moral emotions in Haidt’s New Synthesis. A phenomenol ogical analysis of the experience of contempt in 48 Spanish subjects shows the structure and some vari ations –prejudiced, self- serving, and altruistic– of this em otion. Quantitative information was later obtained with the help of blind coders. Some spontaneous facial expressions that sometimes accompany self-reports are also shown. Finally, some future directions in the Robotic s-Psychology intersection are presented (e.g., gender differences in social behavior).