Emotional Intelligence: Giving Computers Effective Emotional Skills to Aid Interaction

Why do computers need emotional intelligence? Science fiction often portrays emotional computers as dangerous and frightening, and as a serious threat to human life. One of the most famous examples is HAL, the supercomputer onboard the spaceship Discovery, in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. HAL could express, recognize and respond to human emotion, and generally had strong emotional skills – the consequences of which were catastrophic. However, since the movie’s release almost 40 years ago, the traditional view of emotions as contributing to irrational and unpredictable behaviour has changed. Recent research has suggested that emotions play an essential role in important areas such as learning, memory, motivation, attention, creativity, and decision making. These findings have prompted a large number of research groups around the world to start examining the role of emotions and emotional intelligence in human-computer interaction (HCI).