Creating characters and robots that give the illusion of life and allow for the user’s suspension of disbelief is still a debated and fundamental goal in the area of virtual agents. Emotional and empathic relationships with these characters provide a path towards achieving this suspension. As such, this workshop will be a meeting point to discuss the creation of agents that are both empathic towards their users and foster empathic reactions towards them by their users. This workshop will be the third on this topic; the first one was organized in AAMAS 2004 in New York and the second in AAMAS 2009 in Budapest.

The main goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers from different disciplines to discuss the creation of emotional and empathic agents. Empathy has been defined as an observer reacting emotionally because he perceives that another is experiencing or about to experience an emotion. Humans, when interacting with virtual agents or robots can be led to feel empathy, and experience a diverse set of emotional reactions. On the other hand, agents and robots can in a certain, perhaps limited way, also show certain emotions in reaction to human emotions, thus seemingly expressing empathy towards other agents and towards humans. By seeking inspiration in emotional and empathic relations established between humans and between humans and animals, in this workshop we expect to explore these two dimensions of emotional and empathic agents.

This workshop will be part of the 11th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent systems (AAMAS), to be held in Valencia Spain on June 4-8, 2012.