Maruta Sugiura

Papers

Total Citations

H-Index

About

Maruta Sugiura is a pioneering researcher at the intersection of social cognition, human-robot interaction, and virtual reality. Her work explores how humans experience complex social emotions—particularly empathic embarrassment—toward non-human agents, fundamentally challenging assumptions about the boundaries of empathy. In her most-cited study, "Empathic embarrassment towards non-human agents in virtual environments" (2023, 4 citations), Sugiura demonstrated that participants feel measurable empathic embarrassment not only when observing human avatars in awkward scenarios, but also when watching robot avatars face similar situations. This finding has profound implications for the design of socially intelligent robots and virtual agents, suggesting that our emotional responses to machines may be more deeply rooted than previously thought. Sugiura’s research bridges social psychology, affective computing, and robotics, offering a fresh lens on how we relate to artificial beings. Her work is gaining traction among scholars studying empathy, embodiment, and human-machine interaction, and it opens new questions about the ethical design of socially aware technologies.