The Role of Affect and Emotion in HCI

Affect and emotion play an important role in our everyday lives: they are present whatever we do, wherever we are, wherever we go, without us being aware of them for much of the time. When it comes to interaction, be it with humans, technology, or humans via technology, we suddenly become more aware of emotion, either by seeing the other's emotional expression, or by not getting an emotional response while anticipating it. Given this, it seems only sensible to commit to affect and emotion in human-computer interaction, to investigate the underlying principles, to study the role they play, to develop methods to quantify them, and to finally build applications that make use of them. In this introductory chapter we discuss and give short accounts on present developments in the field, covering theoretical issues, user experience and design aspects, sensing issues, and report on some affective applications that have been developed.