Emotional Matters: Innovative software brings emotional intelligence to our digital devices

In 1872, Charles Darwin published The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, in which he argued that mammals show emotion reliably in their faces. Since then, thousands of studies have confirmed the robustness of Darwin's argument in many fields, including linguistics, semiotics, social psychology, and computer science. More interestingly, several studies, including those of renowned psychologist Paul Ekman, demonstrated that basic emotions are, indeed, universal. Affectiva, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology spinoff located in Waltham, Massachusetts, builds a variety of products that harness the two main characteristics of facial expressions-robustness and universality-to measure and analyze emotional responses.