Preprint of a forthcoming encyclopedia entry. This is the author version of a contribution that will appear in:The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology (Springer), edited by Thomas Teo (Springer) The final published version may differ from this preprint. --- Abstract 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 theoretical 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 distributed process. This entry explores the origins, conceptual shifts, debates, and implications of artificial empathy, with particular attention to its potential to reshape understandings of emotion, sociality, and human–machine interaction.
Luisa Damiano (Thu,) studied this question.