Emotional Intelligence: Giving Computers Effective Emotional Skills to Aid Interaction

Why do computers need emotional intelligence? Science fiction often portrays emotional computers as dangerous and frightening, and as a serious threat to human life. One of the most famous examples is HAL, the supercomputer onboard the spaceship Discovery, in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. HAL could express, recognize and respond to human emotion, and generally had strong emotional skills — the consequences of which were catastrophic. However, since the movie’s release almost 40 years ago, the traditional view of emotions as contributing to irrational and unpredictable behavior has changed. Recent research has suggested that emotions play an essential role in important areas such as learning, memory, motivation, attention, creativity, and decision making. These findings have prompted a large number of research groups around the world to start examining the role of emotions and emotional intelligence in human-computer interaction (HCI).

For almost half a century, computer scientists have been attempting to build machines that can interact intelligently with us, and despite initial optimism, they are still struggling to do so. For much of this time, the role of emotion in developing intelligent computers was largely overlooked, and it is only recently that interest in this area has risen dramatically. This increased interest can largely be attributed to the work of [6] and [85] who were amongst the first to bring emotion to the attention of computer scientists. The former highlighted emotion as a fundamental component required in building believable agents, while the latter further raised the awareness of emotion and its potential importance in HCI. Since these publications, the literature on emotions and computing has grown considerably with progress being made on a number of different fronts.