Empathy scale adaptation for artificial agents: a review with a new subscale proposal

Abstract

The communication between humans and artificial agents is becoming crucial and significant in daily life, especially with the advancements in the fields of human-robot and human-computer interaction. For these artificial agents to be recognized as social beings, they should exhibit emotional and empathic behaviors. However, there is no global agreement on measuring the empathic capabilities of these agents. For this reason, the scientific community has paid a significant focus on developing a standardized metric to perceive artificial agents' empathy. In this regard, this article provides a discussion on challenges in artificial empathy evaluation and researches the developments to discuss the factors and recommendations to design a globally accepted metric. It also discusses the qualities required for a globally accepted and standardized metric. Finally, an adaptation to an existing questionnaire is proposed for the evaluation of empathy in artificial agents.