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Compassion Cluster Expression Features in Affective Robotics from a Cross-Cultural Perspective

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Cognitive Infocommunications, Theory and Applications

Part of the book series: Topics in Intelligent Engineering and Informatics ((TIEI,volume 13))

Abstract

The present paper focuses on a comparison between expressive features of principal members of the British English emotion cluster of compassion (empathy, sympathy and compassion) and their prototypical dictionary equivalents in Polish, empatia and współczucie. A cross-cultural asymmetry between the English and Polish clusters is argued to increase in the case of the Polish emotion sympatia, which presents a more peripheral correspondence pattern than the more polysemous concept of English sympathy and is shown to belong to a different Emotion Cluster (love/happiness). The expression features of empathy, sympathy and compassion in British English and Polish need to be tuned accordingly in socially interactive robots to enable them to operate successfully in these cultures. The results showed that British English compassion is characterized by more positive valence and more of a desire to act than Polish współczucie. Polish empatia, as juxtaposed to British English empathy, which has a wider range of application, presents a less consistent pattern of correspondences. The results further showed that although the processes of emotion recognition and expression in robotics must be tuned to culture-specific emotion models, the more explicit patterns of responsiveness (British English for the compassion model in our case) is also recommended for the transfer to make cognitive and sensory infocommunication more readily interpretable by interacting agents.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Apart from individualism-collectivism, Hofstede has developed other dimensions pertaining to culture, namely power distance, uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, indulgence, and long term orientation [18]. However, these are beyond the scope of the present focus.

  2. 2.

    In Polish this shift in meaning is accompanied by a historical syntactic change: from the older form współczuć z kimś ‘to co-feel with somebody’ to the contemporary structure współczuć komuś lit. ‘to co-feel [to] somebody’ (Dative case).

  3. 3.

    Descriptions of the power, arousal and novelty dimensions are not provided as these dimensions are not included in the GRID analyses in the present study.

  4. 4.

    Each of the participants was randomly presented with 4 of the 24 prototypical emotion terms to rate and each of these terms was rated separately on each of the 144 emotion features.

  5. 5.

    Due to space restrictions what is presented in this section is a summary of the procedure followed to select the emotion terms.

  6. 6.

    As each participant rated 4 of the 24 prototypical emotion terms on the 144 emotion features, the overall amount of subjects in the British English and Polish datasets is larger than the numbers of participants that rated the specific emotion terms in each language.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. State University of Applied Sciences in Konin, Konin, Poland

    Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk

  2. University of Łódź, Łódź, Poland

    Paul A. Wilson

Authors
  1. Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk
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  2. Paul A. Wilson
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Correspondence to Paul A. Wilson .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Electronics, Wrocław University of Science and Technology, Wrocław, Poland

    Ryszard Klempous

  2. Faculty of Electronics, Wrocław University of Science and Technology, Wrocław, Poland

    Jan Nikodem

  3. Széchenyi István University, Győr, Hungary

    Péter Zoltán Baranyi

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Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, B., Wilson, P.A. (2019). Compassion Cluster Expression Features in Affective Robotics from a Cross-Cultural Perspective. In: Klempous, R., Nikodem, J., Baranyi, P. (eds) Cognitive Infocommunications, Theory and Applications. Topics in Intelligent Engineering and Informatics, vol 13. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95996-2_10

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