Affective computing: the mood thermometer in the lecture hall

Here’s the anecdote that was most telling about the wrong track taken by Affective Computing, the book by MIT’s Rosalind Picard about the digitizing of emotion.
Picard writes about giving a lecture as part of an elearning program. She was troubled by the fact that she could not read the emotional responses of people in the audience, unlike a physical lecture hall, when you have visual signals of interest. Her suggestion was to wire the audience, and get a digital readout of the emotions.
In recent years, conferences and remote meetings have developed a different mechanism to read the response othe participants. A simple text chat enables people who are engaged to show and share emotions with smiles praise, questions, or heckling. In great presentations, the backchat is dead silent, as the audience is spell-bound.
Unlike a physical room, where even someone silent may reveal emotional signals through physical signs of boredeom, excitement, or anger, a backchat reveals nothing from someone who is silent. That’s not quite true – someone who wants to telegraph excitement or displeasure in a 3D meeting room will also use backchat signals. In small groups, silence in a teleconference and backchat is also revealing. A group leader can ask someone who is unusually silent to say what they are thinking.
Another big difference is that in a lecture hall, or a remote presentation with backchat, participants have substantial control over the emotions they display. Picard’s hypothetical mood thermometer might pick up on involuntary emotions, or emotions the participant might want to hide. A participant might be feeling angry at a family member, or lustful for a fellow member of the audience, or exhausted because of a small infant at home. Picard’s hypothetical mood-reader would transmit those emotions to the lecturer.
Picard herself notes that all known emotion-detecting technology can be fooled by skilled humans. So emotional surveillance in the virtual classroom would lead to unnatural emotional repression. what’s weirder, the mood thermometer is one-way — the lecturer can see the mood of the audience, but the audience can’t read each other. Backchat is very different from the mood thermometer. Like same-place emotions, backchat allows participants to feed on each other expicitly. This difference comes directly from Picard’s belief that affective computing is “personal” — her model doesn’t include the social aspects of much of human emotion.
The backchat model can be extended to include emoticons, color feedback, and other signals to share emotions with other participants and the leader. These nonverbal signals can complement text chat; allowing people to do the thing they’re good at, combining thoughts and emotions in communication.
Picard’s theories rely on complex tools to automate emotions, rather than on simpler tools that allow people to share thoughts and emotions with each other. I think her theories are misguided, in an interesting and revealing way.

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