Scientific findings have indicated that emotions play an essential role in decision making, perception, learning, and more - that is, they influence the very mechanisms of rational thinking. Not only too much, but too little emotion can impair decision making. According to Rosalind Picard, if we want computers to be genuinely intelligent and to interact naturally with us, we must give computers the ability to recognize, understand, even to have and express emotions. Part 1 of this book provides the intellectual framework for affective computing. It includes background on human emotions, requirements for emotionally intelligent computers, applications of affective computing, and moral and social questions raised by the technology. Part 2 discusses the design and construction of affective computers. Although this material is more technical than that in Part 1, the author has kept it less technical than typical scientific publications in order to make it accessible to newcomers. Topics in Part 2 include signal-based representations of emotions, human affect recognition as a pattern recognition and learning problem, recent and ongoing efforts to build models of emotion for synthesizing emotions in computers, and the new application area of affective wearable computers.

I never thought I would write a book on emotion. Being a woman who is an engineer, a computer scientist, and a professor at MIT, has provided extra incentive to avoid anything that might stereotype me as an "emotional female.''
Yet this book is about giving emotional abilities to certain kinds of computers. This may sound outlandish, and you may wonder if I have not lost a wariness of emotions and their association with poor judgment and irrational behavior. I have not. Computers certainly do not need poor judgment and irrational behavior. One of the things I attempt to show in this book, however, is that in completely avoiding emotion, computer designers may actually lead computers toward these undesirable goals.
The role of emotions in "being emotional'' is a small part of their story. The rest is largely untold, and I think has profound consequences. I wrote this book to compile the findings (from neuroscience, cognitive science, psychology, and more) that led me to believe that emotion was a key ingredient of human intelligence and of intelligent interaction. I also present my own ideas for what it means for a computer to have skills of emotional intelligence. But I do not think we should run out and give machines emotions (and I define what I mean in the book by "giving them emotions," including aspects of this that will differ significantly from human emotions.) Some uses of this technology are potentially very disturbing, and I include a chapter discussing ethical concerns.
In Part II of the book, where I talk about how to build affective computers, I tried to cover both my group's work and the work of others as much as possible, to illustrate what is already doable vs. what is still science fiction. Well, let me not take too much of your time here; I hope you will learn from the book, and feel free to share your comments.