Towards emotional computer-interaction

Although central to human development and functioning, emotions have, until recently, had somewhat marginal status in scientific disciplines in general and have been largely ignored in the more applied settings such as human factors. Over the past 10 years however, research in emotion in both psychology and neuroscience has established that emotion is intricately linked with what has been traditionally thought of as purely cognitive functions; that is, attention, perception, memory, planning, learning, etc. There realizations, together with increasing demands in the areas of human-machine interaction, and advances in human-computer interaction technologies, have fueled the recent interest in a broad area termed 'affective computing'. Affective computing is computing that relates to, arises from or deliberately influences emotion. This paper will discuss this emerging new field.-3