Rana el Kaliouby, a Cambridge- and MIT-trained scientist and leader in facial emotion recognition technology, is concerned about how computers are affecting the emotional lives of her two small children.

There is much research that suggests that emotional intelligence develops from social interactions, yet children are increasingly spending their days in front of computers, tablets, and smartphones. Today, children under the age of eight spend on average two full hours a day in front of screens. El Kaliouby is deeply concerned about what happens when children grow up around technology that does not express emotion and cannot read our emotion. Does that cause us, in turn, to stop expressing emotion?

The answer, according to recent research, is yes. A University of California-Los Angeles study last year found that children who had regular access to phones, televisions, and computers were significantly worse at reading human emotions than those who went five days without exposure to technology.

But el Kaliouby does not believe the solution lies in ridding the world of technology. Instead, she believes we should be working to make computers more emotionally intelligent. In 2009, she cofounded a company called Affectiva, just outside Boston, where scientists create tools that allow computers to read faces, precisely connecting each brow furrow or smile line to a specific emotion.

The company has created an “emotion engine” called Affdex that studies faces from webcam footage, identifying subtle movements and relating them to emotional or cognitive states. The technology is sophisticated enough to distinguish smirks from smiles, or unhappy frowns from the empathetic pursing of lips. It then uses these data to measure the subject’s level of joy, surprise, or confusion.

When I met el Kaliouby at TEDWomen in May, she put me in front of an iPad equipped with Affdex technology. An image of my face appeared onscreen covered in dots that appeared to be tracking wrinkles on my forehead, smile lines, cheekbones, and dozens of other relevant points on my face. When I smiled a little, the joy index would go up slightly, and when I burst into a full-blown laugh, the joy index shot up. When I watched a short video, a graph emerged that tracked my facial expression at every second, revealing what parts of the video I found engaging or funny.

“The technology is able to deduce emotions that we might not even be able to articulate, because we are not fully aware of them,” el Kaliouby tells me. “When a viewer sees a funny video, for instance, the Affdex might register a split second of confusion or disgust before the viewer smiles or laughs, indicating that there was actually something disturbing to them in the video.”