A computational model of emotional alignment

Abstract

In order to make human-robot interaction more smooth and intuitive it is necessary to enable robots to interact emotionally. Having a robot which can align to interlocutors emotion expressions will enhance its emotional and social competence. Therefore we propose a computational model of emotional alignment. This model regards emotions from a communicative and interpersonal view and is based on three layers: The first layer comprises the automatic emotional alignment, the second layer the schematic emotional alignment and the third one the conceptual emotional alignment. In a next step we have to implement our model on a robotic platform and to evaluate it.