Did anyone ever tell you that you wear your heart on your sleeve? It’s a popular expression, but obviously no one is looking at your sleeve to read your emotions. Instead, we tend to study a person’s facial expressions to “read” their emotions. Most of us think we’re rather good at reading faces, but we couldn’t say exactly how we make our interpretations, and we don’t know whether they are accurate. But what if we could use technology to know how another person is feeling? Would it be ethical to do so in the workplace and then act on our findings? Technology is not quite ready to do this. Face reading is a complex science. Paul Ekman, a noted psychologist, may be the best human face reader in the world. He has been studying the interpretation of emotions for over 40 years and developed a catalog of over 5,000 muscle movements and their emotional content. His work even spawned a television series called Lie to Me, in which the main characters analyzed microexpressions—expressions that occur in a fraction of a second—to assist in corporate and governmental investigations. Using Ekman’s Facial Coding System, technology firms like Emotient Inc. have been developing algorithms to match microexpressions to emotions. These organizations are currently looking for patterns of microexpressions that might predict behavior.

Honda, Procter & Gamble (P&G), Coca-Cola, and Unilever have tried the technology to identify the reactions to new products, with mixed results. For one thing, expressions can change instantly, so it is challenging to discern which emotions prevail. A person watching a commercial, for instance, may smile, furrow his brow, and raise his eyebrows all in the space of 30 seconds, indicating expressiveness, confusion, and surprise in turn. Second, it is difficult to know whether a person will act on these fleeting emotions. Third, the technology might misinterpret the underlying emotions or their causes. The potential applications of this technology to the workplace include surveillance, gauging reactions to organization announcements, and lie detection. Cameras could be in every meeting room, hallway, and even on employees’ computer screens. Emotion monitoring could be an announced event—say, every Monday from 8 to 9 a.m.—or random. Monitoring could be conducted with or without the knowledge of employees; for instance, data on the emotional reactions of every employee in an organizational announcement meeting could be read and interpreted through a camera on the wall.

Questions 

1. What do you think are the best workplace applications for emotion reading technology? 

2. What are the ethical implications of reading faces for emotional content in the workplace? 

3. Assuming you could become better at detecting the real emotions of others from facial expressions, do you think it would help your career? Why or why not?