SOCIAL ROBOTS, MORAL EMOTIONS

The affective revolution in Psychology has produced enough knowledge to implement abilities of emotional recognition and expression in robots. However, the emotional 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 respecting the moral values implicit in the social behavior of their inhabitants, then these robots will have to be programmed 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 phenomenological analysis of the experience of contempt in 48 Spanish subjects shows the structure and some variations prejudiced, self-serving, and altruistic of this emotion. 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 Robotics-Psychology intersection are presented (e.g., gender differences in social behavior).