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About

Sara Mongile is a pioneering researcher in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), whose work centers on the psychological and social dynamics between humans and social robots. Her key research areas include social exclusion, attachment theory, and adaptive robot behavior, with a focus on designing robots that can understand and respond to human emotional and relational needs. In her highly cited 2023 paper, *"What if a Social Robot Excluded You?"* (8 citations), Mongile demonstrated that social robots can effectively replicate the discomfort of human social rejection, highlighting their potential as tools for studying group dynamics. She further advanced the field by validating a cortisol-inspired framework for HRI through a replication of the Still Face Paradigm (2022), bridging biological stress responses with robotic interaction. Her most recent work (2025) introduces a comfort-driven cognitive framework that enables robots to autonomously adjust their behavior based on a user’s attachment style, pushing toward truly adaptive social agents. With a total of 14 citations across her core publications, Mongile’s research is laying the groundwork for emotionally intelligent robots that can foster more natural, supportive, and personalized human-robot relationships—a critical step for the future of assistive and social robotics.