OPINION published: 13 April 2022 doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.768416 Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 1 April 2022 | Volume 13 | Article 768416 Edited by: Fabio Bonsignorio, Heron Robots, Italy Reviewed by: Felice Cimatti, University of Calabria, Italy *Correspondence: Alfonsina Scarinzi alfonsinascarinzi@googlemail.com Specialty section: This article was submitted to Cognitive Science, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology Received: 31 August 2021 Accepted: 25 February 2022 Published: 13 April 2022 Citation: Scarinzi A and Cañamero L (2022) Toward Affective Interactions: E-Motions and Embodied Artificial Cognitive Systems. Front. Psychol. 13:768416. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.768416 Toward Affective Interactions: E-Motions and Embodied Artificial Cognitive Systems Alfonsina Scarinzi 1,2 * and Lola Cañamero 3 1 CY AS Institute for Advanced Studies, CY Cergy Paris Université, Cergy, France, 2 Zentrale Einrichtung fuer Sprachen und Schluesselqualifikationen (ZESS), University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany, 3 ETIS Lab, CY Cergy Paris Université, Cergy, France Keywords: embodiment/bodily experience, emotions and affectivity, human-robot-interaction, e-motion and artificial agents, affective interactions between humans and robots, movement and emotions INTRODUCTION Emotion is at the core of the human experience. It enriches and makes meaningful and memorable our lives, our practices, our places, our tools, locations in a landscape, ritual actions, habits, and interactions with each other and with the environment. It represents bodily mediated evaluations (Petrides, 2018). In artificial agents like autonomous robots, emotions can be considered to be an integral part of a behavior-based robot’s architecture. As “second-order” control mechanisms for fast adaptation to changing circumstances, they can alter motivational priorities and behavior execution and improve action selection, which is relevant for the robot survival, as Cañamero and Gaussier (2005) and Cañamero (2019) remark. It is acknowledged that emotion and affectivity—the ability to move to emotion—are embodied, situated, and distributed in the environment, related and subordinated to the movement (Fuchs and Koch, 2014). Any interaction that is colored with emotion is affective. Emotions can be considered to be affective responses to events of concern to a sense-maker or agent, implying bodily changes and motivating specific movements and behavior and are articulated spatially through the making of spaces and environments that actively engage the sense-maker or agent in the regulation and control of movement (Tarlow, 2012; Kaczmarczyk, 2013). The properties of a garden, for example, can provide joyful visual, acoustic, olfactory, and tactile properties that can influence the way the sense-maker walks to explore it. A garden can be full of affective affordances—the likelihood of a situation eliciting emotional states and behaviors—located in a way that structures the stroll as a mosaic of intermittent motion and stillness giving rise to dynamics of movements that can be experienced as pleasurable and joyful: paths to walk on, benches to sit on, plants unusually close to the sense-maker which encircle a pool in the garden, for example. Accordingly, emotions emerge as specific forms of bodily directedness toward the valences and affordances of a given situation in the engagement with the environment that has affect-like properties: e.g., the emotion of joy is extended over the affordances in the environment, over the sense-maker, her feeling and perceiving body and the joyful situation as a whole. Against this background, it is more accurate to say that the (human or artificial) sense-maker’s mode of being in interaction is joyful, instead of merely saying that the sense-maker is joyful. This contribution reflects upon the conditions for movement-based affective interactions between artificial agents, which are programmed to move, and human agents, which are moved to move, from an embodied and distributed perspective, and answers the question of how a shift of attention from emotion categorization and recognition to the role of movement can contribute to research on affective interactions between human and artificial agents.