Affective Grounding in Human-Robot Interaction

Participating in interaction requires not only coordination on content and process, as previously proposed, but also on affect. The term affective grounding is introduced to refer to the coordination of affect in interaction with the purpose of building shared understanding about what behavior can be exhibited, and how behavior is interpreted emotionally and responded to. Affective Ground is achieved when interactants have reached shared understanding about how behavior should be interpreted emotionally. The paper contributes a review and critique of current perspectives on emotion in HRI. Further it outlines how research on emotion in HRI can benefit from taking an affective grounding perspective and outlines implications for the design of robots capable of participating in the coordination on affect in interaction.