In his famous thought experiments on synthetic vehicles, Valentino Braitenberg stipulated that simple stimulus-response reactions in an organism could evoke the appearance of complex behavior, which, to the unsuspecting human observer, may even appear to be driven by emotions such as fear, aggression, and even love (Braitenberg, Vehikel. Experimente mit künstlichen Wesen, Lit Verlag, 2004). In fact, humans appear to have a strong propensity to anthropomorphize, driven by our inherent desire for predictability that will quickly lead us to discern patterns, cause-and-effect relationships, and yes, emotions, in animated entities, be they natural or artificial. But might there be reasons, that we should intentionally "implement" emotions into artificial entities, such as robots? How would we proceed in creating robot emotions? And what, if any, are the ethical implications of creating "emotional" robots? The following article aims to shed some light on these questions with a multi-disciplinary review of recent empirical investigations into the various facets of emotions in robot psychology.

The perception of distance when walking through an urban area depends on several factors. In addition to knowledge of the physical length of a route based on known parameters such as the walking speed and the time or number of steps, this paper also discusses external factors such as the visual appearance and details of the route and internal factors such as the physiological effort or emotional states during the walk. It is not clear which of the latter factors are stored in memory and are used to estimate a perceived distance. The hypothesis of distance estimation on the basis of perceived and remembered effort is held by several researchers. The reported experiments tried to clarify that question with research in actual reality and virtual reality. In doing so, we were able to separate the component of real walking from other sources that possibly affect distance estimation. In addition, this work demonstrates the power of experiments in VR compared with equivalent experiments in reality.

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Spatial orientation as the ability to know the bearing to the origin of a walked path was investigated in two studies with ca. 140 preschool and primary school children who walked paths of about 1 km beginning at the familiar kindergarten or in a completely unknown territory. Path difficulty and familiarity with the surroundings influenced correctness of pointing. Spatial ability measured by test performance and spatial activity experience, i.e., children’s reports about unsupervised walks, effected pointing accuracy as well. The data emphasize that spatial activity experience may be an important factor for spatial orientation beyond kindergarten age.