Newman, Marie S., Senadji, Bouchra, White, Katherine M., and Fookes, Clinton (2025) Empathy in Long-Term Human–Robot Interaction: A Scoping Review of Emotion Understanding. International Journal of Social Robotics, 17 (1). pp. 191-210.

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Abstract

While the field of human–robot interaction (HRI) continues to evolve, an ongoing challenge in social robot research lies in the ability to sustain long-term HRI. The purpose of this review is to investigate the role of empathy in long-term HRI, with a particular focus on emotion understanding. After conducting a systematic search across 7 databases, a total of 674 records published up to August 2023 were identified. After applying our eligibility criteria, 11 empirical studies were selected for the review. Our findings highlight how emotion understanding is primarily used to help inform a social robot’s adaptive responses to help sustain user engagement. While the reviewdemonstrates varyingapproaches to operationalisingemotion understanding inempathy, some key considerations for future long-term HRI research in social robots include how long-term should be defined, how emotions are analysed and measured, and experimental design considerations for empirical HRI research. A specific area warranting further investigation is how accuracy of emotion understanding could impact long-term HRI.

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