"It's Amazing, We Are All Feeling It!" — Emotional Climate as a Group-Level Emotional Expression in HRI

Emotions are a key element in all human interactions. It is well documented that individual- and group-level interactions have different emotional expressions and humans are by nature extremely competent in perceiving, adapting and reacting to them. However, when developing social robots, emotions are not so easy to cope with. In this paper we introduce the concept of emotional climate applied to human-robot interaction (HRI) to define a group-level emotional expression at a given time. By doing so, we move one step further in developing a new tool that deals with group emotions within HRI.