This paper is about software systems, not pharmaceuticals. It is a particularly well-documented and intelligently detailed summary of devices and techniques used to acquire emotion indication metrics, and psychology-derived models used for interpreting those metrics. Human emotions span personal experience, personal projection, and interpersonal perception; some aspects are captured by tracking eye dilation, direction, and movement; monitoring voice volume, pitch, and intonation; observing cardiovascular irregularity; and so on. Of course, projections and perceptions are culturally calibrated, and perhaps experiences are, too (leaving “therapeutic” mindfulness meditation, medication, or incarceration for inappropriately “calibrated” individuals)--a social reality marginally beyond the scope of this survey. Even stranger, various ancient professions esteem false emotion arts (as taught, practiced, and presented in theater, advertising, management, parenting, and private “liaisons”)--another ineffable peculiarity that may motivate the funding of much of the reported research.

Now, this paper strongly focuses on emotional projection and perception--although fooling users into believing that software systems experience emotions would certainly constitute a new and highly lucrative falsehood achievement. Simply stated, apparent advancements in experimental and theoretical psychology are driving “the rise for emotion-enhanced interaction,” which in turn will provide a rich return on investment (ROI) reward for anyone developing next-generation front-end user interfaces with emotion sensitive back-end orientation controllers. Accordingly, “real-time detection and classification of user emotions is at the base of not only affective computing,” but also at outsmarting users, much as game-playing programs now beat respective game masters. Let the (insufficiently artificial intelligence (AI) savvy) public beware!