Emotional and Intelligent II: The Tangled Knot of Social Cognition:
Papers from the AAAI Fall Symposium
Lola D. Cañamero, Chair
According to some theories, emotions come into play as soon as we consider individuals in interaction with their social environment. For some researchers, emotions are at the very heart of what being social means. In the last years, the AI community has echoed the importance of emotions in social interactions in a growing number of applications: expressive and social robots, animated and storytelling characters with "feelings," expressive interfaces, systems for human-computer emotional interaction, etc. This symposium proposed a multi-disciplinary framework where researchers could exchange ideas and reflect on the motivations, scientific grounds, and practical consequences of these efforts.
The symposium investigated the role of emotions in grounding interpersonal behaviors and social cognition, from the perspective of both the individual and the collectivity. The main focus was on natural and artificial agents (in all sorts of embodiments) in social environments, and on the possibilities for cross-fertilization between research in artificial emotions and studies of emotions in animals and humans.