In a move akin to Google’s efforts to help you avoid drunk e-mailing, computer scientists are now trying to keep you happy while using the Web—by gauging when you get ticked off.

From three different experiments, researchers found that Internet users who became frustrated, confused, or upset while online tended to move their cursor sporadically and less precisely, instead of in smooth strokes. Perturbed users also tended to navigate their mouse more slowly, not faster as some might expect. The findings, reported in the information systems journal MIS Quarterly, may allow computer scientists or website developers to identify and intervene in real time when users become agitated with the interface or content of a site.

"Using this technology, websites will no longer be dumb," Jeff Jenkins, lead study author and an information systems professor at Brigham Young University, said in a press release. "Websites can go beyond just presenting information, but they can sense you. They can understand not just what you're providing, but what you're feeling."

For their emotional surfing studies, Jenkins and colleagues randomly frustrated 65 participants from Amazon’s crowdsourcing marketplace Mechanical Turk as they carried out a number-ordering task. By monitoring their cursor movements, the researchers found that when users were peeved their cursor distance increased and speed decreased, which Jenkins admitted was a bit counterintuitive.

Still, taking the information into account, the researchers then did a similar experiment, randomly frustrating 126 different participants as they clicked around on a mock e-commerce site. Eyeing their cursor movements, the researchers could identify when a user was annoyed with nearly 82 percent accuracy.

In a third and final experiment, another 80 participants reported their emotional levels as they interacted with a potentially frustrating online tool for customizing a product. The researchers found that cursor movement could not only give away negative emotions, but also the level of negative emotion.

Jenkins hopes that the new method of monitoring users' emotions could help Web developers iron out problematic features on websites that drive away Web traffic. “Traditionally it has been very difficult to pinpoint when a user becomes frustrated, leading them to not come back to a site,” Jenkins said. "Being able to sense a negative emotional response, we can adjust the website experience to eliminate stress or to offer help."

In future work, he aims to come up with a similar way to measure negative emotions of mobile device users.