Supporting Emotion Communication in Information Systems

Society is becoming increasingly reliant on Information Systems to meet its everyday communication requirements, yet many current implementations lack support for important conversational cues. One such cue is emotion communication. Emotion communication carries with it many signals that affect our behaviour, the interpretation of the message and provide a catalyst to other forms of communication such as empathy and the formation of social ties. Emotion itself can affect the very decision to communicate, or the way in which one may respond to a given communication. To explore the ways in which systems may better support emotion communication between members of a social group, a cloud-based information system was developed and trialled which both large and small groups. This paper presents results on how Information Systems can best support emotion communication in social groups.