Biological, Designed, and, Possibly Own-Robot Emotions

The major disciplines contributing to affective science are: philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, AI, and medicine. This complexity is exacerbated by the fact that there are important cultural differences affecting the phenomena studied by affective science. A useful contribution to the latter would be even partial clearing of the terminological chaos that characterise it and provision of an interdisciplinary globally accepted working framework. The objective of this chapter is to contribute to this end by addressing the issue of the nature of emotional biological systems and affective robots. In particular: (i) it proposes a cluster of issues that any theory of affective science, and therefore of mind, should address; (ii) reviews the major theories on the generation and regulation of emotions; (iii) defines human and animal emotions and develops a rudimentary theory of them; and (iv) discusses the scope and limits of affective computing.