Artificial Empathy

Artificial empathy refers to the capacity of artificial agents—particularly social robots— to engage in interactions based on emotional communication that are interpreted as empathic by human users. While often treated as a simulation of human emotional capacities, the concept has evolved into a site of theoret- ical inquiry at the intersection of cognitive science and (embodied) AI, philosophy of mind, philosophy of technology, and ethics. Rather than interpreting empathy in terms of internal emotional states, emerging approaches reframe it as a relational, embodied, and dis- tributed process. This entry explores the ori- gins, conceptual shifts, debates, and implications of artificial empathy, with partic- ular attention to its potential to reshape under- standings of emotion, sociality, and human– machine interaction.