TY - CONF T1 - Constructing Emotions: Epistemological Groundings and Applications in Robotics for a Synthetic Approach to Emotions T2 - International Symposium on AI-Inspired Biology Y1 - 2010 A1 - Luisa Damiano A1 - Lola Cañamero ED - Jackie Chappell ED - Susannah Thorpe ED - Nick Hawes ED - Aaron Sloman AB - Can the sciences of the artificial positively contribute to the scientific exploration of life and cognition? Can they actually improve the scientific knowledge of natural living and cognitive processes, from biological metabolism to reproduction, from conceptual mapping of the environment to logic reasoning, language, or even emotional expression? To these kinds of questions our article aims to answer in the affirmative. Its main object is the scientific emergent methodology often called the “synthetic approach”, which promotes the programmatic production of embodied and situated models of living and cognitive systems in order to explore aspects of life and cognition not accessible in natural systems and scenarios. The first part of this article presents and discusses the synthetic approach, and proposes an epistemological framework which promises to warrant genuine transmission of knowledge from the sciences of the artificial to the sciences of the natural. The second part of this article looks at the research applying the synthetic approach to the psychological study of emotional development. It shows how robotics, through the synthetic methodology, can develop a particular perspective on emotions, coherent with current psychological theories of emotional development and fitting well with the recent “cognitive extension” approach proposed by cognitive sciences and philosophy of mind. JF - International Symposium on AI-Inspired Biology PB - The Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour CY - De Montford University, Leicester, UK SN - 1902956923 UR - http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/aiib/Symposium_6/Papers/Damiano.pdf N1 - Download (PDF) ER -