More than a feeling

deterministic and somewhat creepy, the stuff of potions and hexes, and way too much of a wicked design/ engineering problem [4]. Such a scenario, I reasoned, requires accurate detection, a good model of emotion and mood and its impact on thought and action, and an understanding of how a person’s reactions and their surrounding context are going to interfere with any initiated interactive sequence. I decided to turn to research to see if there exist grounds for these optimistic, techno-detection-of-emotion media narratives. The plethora of disciplines interested in emotion (for example, biology, linguistics, psychology, sociology, cultural studies, anthropology, design, literary studies, performing arts) suggests questions many have pondered: What is the relationship between emotion, thought, and action? How can we detect and measure emotion? How can we assess the influence of emotion on thinking and action? Some conclude that emotions are an annoying flaw in an otherwise perfect reasoning system. Others assert that emotion/ feeling and reason are intertwined, that it is futile to assert that emotion-free cognition is even possible. In 1994, António Damásio argued from neuroscientific evidence that emotions play a critical role in cognition, provide the scaffolding for the construction of social cognition, and underlie all human consciousness [5]. Armed with Damásio’s perspective, I delved deeper into theories on emotion, hoping to find more evidence as to the nature and have learned that perceived options change and that people make different choices among the same set of options depending on their emotional state. Well, I pondered, perhaps we can detect subtle cues about someone’s state, and based on those cues present more copacetic options and different interaction experiences. It is postulated that people have visceral, precognitive positive or negative reactions to things [2]. Perhaps a person’s emotional state can be detected before that person realizes how he or she feels? Perhaps there could be sensors in my phone handset that detect my emotional state and initiate cheer-up, calm-down, or fall-in-love sequences? Evidence suggests that visceral responses aren’t just in response to a specific artifact or situation; they can be modulated by social factors. “Affective priming” studies suggest that others’ emotional states can affect our decision making even if we are unaware of it: People take more risks after being subliminally exposed to smiling faces than to frowning ones [3]. If the customer-service line I called had subliminally played laughter over the phone line, maybe my ascension to agitation would have been prevented. As I idly entertained myself with these techno-speculative reveries, I came across a discussion of innovations in sensor technologies that can reliably tell us what people are feeling, can accurately map their emotional states. Frankly, I had cast aside my reveries as overly Mildly irritated. Frustrated. Somewhat annoyed. Profoundly agitated. This was the trajectory of feeling I experienced this afternoon as I ascended and descended a customer-service phone tree in the hopes of reaching a human who could (or would) answer my question. As I reached a flushed state of agitation, I had a meta-moment. I was catapulted out of my immediate experience into a view of myself from a distance: You are seeing red [1]. Your reaction is unreasonable. Stop. Get a grip. Take a deep breath. Hang up the phone. As a result of this incident, in the longstanding tradition of armchair philosophy, I started to ponder: What are feeling, affect, emotion? Was I really being unreasonable having an emotional reaction, by feeling agitated? What reactions are reasonable and unreasonable in this context? Would others have been swept away with agitation and simply shouted at the person who finally answered? Would I have felt better if I had done that? Aside from hiring more people, what, if anything, could the company have done to prevent this ascension to annoyance? What was clear to me was that a tinny rendition of Antonio Vivaldi’s Four Seasons was not cutting it in the keep-Elizabeth-calm department. For decades human-computerinteraction professionals have been thinking about cognition and how to present choices in ways that are intuitively obvious. We have worried about how to measure emotions like frustration for almost as long. We P ot og ra p h by S aa d K ad hi