FACEBOOK, email, texting, instant messaging – more of our life than ever is lived through our keyboards. Communicating emotion through type can be hard, though.

That could be about to change. By measuring the way someone is typing – the speed, rhythm and how often they use backspace – and then combining that information with an emotional analysis of the typed text, a computer program has been able to predict how they are feeling with 80 per cent accuracy.

Nazmul Haque Nahin and colleagues at the Islamic University of Technology in Bangladesh asked volunteers to type phrases presented to them on a screen, including passages from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. First they built a model by measuring and recording information on how people type while also asking them how they were feeling – joyful, guilty, disgusted or tired, for example. When the volunteers were asked to carry out the task a second time, the software used this model to predict how a person was feeling as they were typing.

Tested on different emotions, the program successfully detected joy 87 per cent of the time, while anger was identified 81 per cent of the time (Behaviour and Information Technology, doi.org/vbt).


This isn’t the first attempt to measure emotions through a keyboard. A team led by Clayton Epp at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada found that anger and excitement were the easiest emotions to detect, because they were only expressed for short periods of time.

Anger and excitement are the easiest emotions to detect, as they only last for a short period of time

“The objective is a good one,” says Joshua Feast, CEO of Cogito, a firm that provides behaviour and voice analytics. “These types of tools can provide automated feedback to individuals to increase self-awareness.”

Although monitoring typing comes with overtones of surveillance, Feast says there are lots of useful applications, such as alerting people when they are typing an email while angry.

Epp foresees an “emotional instant messaging client”: an app that works like a more sophisticated form of emoticon. Subtle cues would alert the recipient to the emotional message’s tone, allowing people to communicate more naturally.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Emailing angry? Your keyboard feels your pain”