Alisa Rieger

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About

Alisa Rieger is a leading researcher at the intersection of human-robot interaction and social robotics, with a core focus on how people perceive empathy and emotional intelligence in artificial agents. Her most influential work, "The RoPE Scale: a Measure of How Empathic a Robot is Perceived" (2019), has garnered 30 citations and addresses a critical gap in the field: the lack of a standardized, validated tool for quantifying perceived robot empathy. By developing and rigorously testing this scale, Rieger provided the research community with a reliable instrument to assess whether robots are truly seen as emotionally attuned interaction partners—a key factor for their acceptance in everyday life. This contribution is foundational for designing more socially adept robots and for empirically grounding debates about machine emotion. Beyond the RoPE Scale, her broader research explores the psychological mechanisms underlying human trust in and attachment to robotic systems. Rieger’s work is notable for bridging experimental psychology and engineering, offering both theoretical insights and practical metrics that shape how robots are developed for caregiving, education, and collaborative settings.