Some systems are explicitly trying to elicit an emotion from you. Their aim is to create a feeling. So, now, this again might be quite a workaday thing, rather than let's say something you think of as an emotion-generating procedure. But when you go to a bank's website, you're perhaps trying to just check your account, but the bank is trying to elicit a sense of dependability, of trust.
So, even on something that's, shall we say quite functional, like getting your money or checking your money, it can be important to elicit emotion. Think about the excitement as you're building up to a holiday. Again, you know, if it's a travel site, they might want to build some of that excitement in order that you go for the holiday with them rather than paying somebody else for it. So, there the system is actually trying to change your emotional state.
Other systems or other times in the same system, your goal might be to *detect the user's emotion* in order to do something with that. So you might use a variety of things, like that might be based on physiological sensing. You know – that could be sort of skin conductance, heart-rate monitoring. If you've got a camera, you can observe somebody's facial expressions, are they looking happy or sad or worried or whatever else? And try to understand what that emotion is.
As I'm speaking now and as you speak, the tone of your voice will give a sense of whether you're bored or whether you're excited. And obviously you can put that on a bit, but also some of that just comes over quite naturally. And again, a computer system can monitor that kind of thing in order to be able to build up an internal model of what that system is. This is often called *affective computing* – systems which use emotion in order to do stuff.
And of course, *why* do you want to detect that emotion? It's often to change the behavior of the system. So, I had a student once who designed a game system where if the person's heart rate went too high, it might make the game a little bit easier just so it didn't kill them. If it goes a bit too low, then it might make the game a little bit more difficult, to raise their level of excitement. And the idea was there's a sort of sweet spot between, you know, harmfulness and boredom,
and you're trying to get them into that spot. There's a number of other types of system which work like this. Some of them it's for the purpose actually of emotion regulation. There are deliberate games which are about that which are trying to get you into perhaps a mindful state or something like that. But the idea is if you understand people's emotion, then you can modify the system. So, think about a smart house.
You may say a command to the system or maybe it just listens to you all the time, anyway. If it could pick up that you're feeling a bit anxious, maybe it will deliberately change the music to be a little bit more sort of moody and relaxing; you know – change the lighting level. You could imagine your voice system saying: "Oh, Alan, you know, I just noticed – I think you're probably feeling a bit stressed.
So, I took the liberty of ordering a takeout so you don't have to cook this evening." We're not quite there yet, but maybe, maybe not too long. And then, finally, the system might just act as a *conduit of emotion*. So, rather than doing its own emotion and rather than acting itself, when you send a message using social media, what's happening is that message is having an emotional effect on whoever receives it.
But the system is not necessarily trying to make sense of what you've done, whether it's a happy or a sad thing, whether it's an angry thing or a friendly thing; you know – all it does is carry whether it's a voice message, whether it's a visual video message, whether it's a text message, so the person at the other end can interpret what's there and in a human-to-human way make sense of it. Now, sometimes that's very direct, as in just carrying your voice.
Sometimes it may be mediated in some way, like emojis do. But the purpose is not to expose your emotion necessarily to the system, although it might monitor it and make some decisions based on that. But your primary purpose there is to pass it on to another person.