Compassion, empathy and sympathy expression features in affective robotics

Abstract

The present paper identifies differences in the expression features of compassion, sympathy and empathy in British English and Polish that need to be tuned accordingly in socially interactive robots to enable them to operate successfully in these cultures. The results showed that English compassion is characterised by more positive valence and more of a desire to act than Polish współczucie. Polish empatia is also characterised by a more negative valence than English empathy, which has a wider range of application. When used in positive contexts, English sympathy corresponds to Polish sympatia; however, it also acquires elements of negative valence in English. The results further showed that although the processes of emotion recognition and expression in robotics must be tuned to culture-specific emotion models, the more explicit patterns of responsiveness (British English for the compassion model in our case) is also recommended for the transfer to make the cognitive and sensory infocommunication more readily interpretable by the interacting agents.