@inproceedings { pereira10, abstract = {For robots to become our personal companions in the future, they need to know how to socially interact with us. One defining characteristic of human social behaviour is empathy. In this paper, we present a robot that acts as a social companion expressing different kinds of empathic behaviours through its facial expressions and utterances. The robot comments the moves of two subjects playing a chess game against each other, being empathic to one of them and neutral towards the other. The results of a pilot study suggest that users to whom the robot was empathic perceived the robot more as a friend.}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Human-Robot Personal Relationships}, keywords = {Affective Computing;Social Robotic Companions;}, pages = {(accepted)}, publisher = {Springer LNICST series (to appear)}, title = {Using Empathy to Improve Human-Robot Relationships}, year = {2010}, author = {André Pereira and Iolanda Leite and Samuel Mascarenhas and Carlos Martinho and Ana Paiva} }