This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Social Robotics, ICSR 2012, held in Chengdu, China, in October 2012. The 66 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on affective and cognitive sciences for socially interactive robots, situated interaction and embodiment, robots to assist the elderly and persons with disabilities, social acceptance of robots and their impact to the society, artificial empathy, HRI through non-verbal communication and control, social telepresence robots, embodiments and networks, interaction and collaboration among robots, humans and environment, human augmentation, rehabilitation, and medical robots I and II.