Although central to human development and functioning, emotions have, until recently, had a somewhat marginal status in scientific disciplines in general, and have been largely ignored in the more applied settings such as human factors. Over the past 10 years, however, research in emotion in both psychology and neuroscience has established that emotion is intricately linked with what has been traditionally thought of as purely cognitive functions; that is, attention, perception, memory, planning, learning, etc. These realizations, together with increasing demands in the areas of human-machine interaction, and advances in human-computer interactions technologies, have fueled the recent burgeoning interest in a broad area termed 'affective computing'. The objective of this panel is three fold: 1) provide a broad overview of affective computing; 2) highlight specific areas in affective computing relevant to human factors; and 3) provide alternative perspectives regarding the feasibility of selected affective computing efforts. SUMMARYAlthough central to human development and functioning, emotions have, until recently, had a somewhat marginal status in scientific disciplines in general, and have been largely ignored in the more applied settings such as human factors. The study of emotions was generally equated with such ineffable phenomena as qualia and consciousness, and it was not clear how these problems could be addressed, or in what way the study of emotions could help elucidate and enhance the nature of human behavior and information processing. Furthermore, emotions were often studied in the context of psychopathology and severely maladaptive behaviors, which served to further marginalize the overall enterprise.

No abstract