The future hints towards promising and exciting advancements in the field of synthetic emotions, according to Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (Spain) professor and renowned scholar Dr. Jordi Vallverdú.  His groundbreaking 2010 journal, International Journal of Synthetic Emotions (IJSE) covers the main issues relevant to the generation, expression, and use of synthetic emotions in agents, robots, systems, and devices.

“Concerning the future of this field, I am completely fascinated and anxious for bottom-up (basic emotions implemented into robotic devices) as well as for top-down (simulations of emotional answers) approaches but, perhaps, the most exciting project for the future is the creation of emotions inside of artificial devices,” says Vallverdú.

Vallverdú states that emotions are action regulators and therefore, inferring from the natural evolution of beings, perhaps the feeling of an emotion is an emergent property of such a complex system.

“Emotions are have been revealed in the last few decades as the key aspect for understanding complex behavior as well as the rationality evolution.  Emotions like pleasure, fear, sadness, or pain, together with empathy towards other beings, explain a lot not only about human heuristics, but also can help us to build better artificial devices.  They can provide the natural way to establish emotional responses between humans and machines.”

Vallverdú’s upcoming journal will cover the most recent and important improvements and results from all the possible fields involved in the relations between emotions, rationality, and actions.

After several previous computational simulations (TPR and TPR 2.0), Vallverdú’s research group SETE (Synthetic Emotions in Technological Environments) is now developing a social robotic project based on basic emotions. Their bottom-up approach is offering interesting results that SETE plans on publishing and developing through the upcoming years.