Emotional Awareness: An Enhanced Computer Mediated Communication Using Facial Expressions

This paper describes the design of a prototype for an emotionally enhanced computer mediated communication system which is aimed at compensating for the emotional distance between communicators. The prototype system encourages the sender to take the emotional perspective of the message receiver by giving the sender a sense of how his message may affect the intended receiver, and by allowing the sender to reconsider sending the message or revise it. The objective of an emotionally enhanced communication system is to raise awareness to the ease in which a written word might be misinterpreted since emotions are too often unseen due to the nature of lean communication media. In order to show the receiver’s assumed emotion, the written text would be parsed before sending the message. An algorithm, for demonstrating the prediction of the emotion a written message might evoke, will choose a facial expression from a pool of 7 expressions, according to the words and phrases inserted in the message. We conducted a user test to evaluate the acceptance and attitudes toward such an emotionally enhanced communication system and received a high level of acceptance and favorable attitudes towards using it.