Emotional awareness in collaborative systems

Emotions play an important role in human interaction. Both, our own emotional state and our perception of that of others with which we collaborate influence the outcome of cooperative work. With the growing interest in providing computational support for the recognition and representation of emotions, there is a clear interest in adding such facilities to groupware systems and to evaluate the positive and negative effects of using this additional channel of communication. We discuss the issues involved in supporting a new type of collaborative awareness in groupware, namely, emotional awareness. We also present two emotion-based sample applications, and discussion to further motivate work in this area within the collaborative community.