Read the reading listed below and then answer the questions in full sentences listed below the reading:

The Reading:

Did anyone ever tell you that you wear your heart on your sleeve? It is a popular expression, but obviously, no one is looking at your sleeve to read your emotions. Instead, we tend to study a persons facial expressions to read their emotions. Most of us think we are rather good at reading faces, but we could not say precisely how we make our interpretations, and we do not 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, has catapulted the field toward making this dream possible. Ekman studied the interpretation of emotions for more than forty years and developed a catalog of more than five thousand muscle movements and emotional content. Ekmans work even spawned a television series called Lie to Me. The main characters analyzed microexpressionsexpressions that occur in a fraction of a secondto assist in corporate and governmental investigations. Using Ekmans 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 their brow, and raise their 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.

This technologys potential applications 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 eventsay, 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 every employees emotional reactions in an organizational announcement meeting could be read and interpreted through a camera on the wall.

So far, the most reliable workplace application seems to be using the technology to capture inconsistencies (lying). Even the pioneer of facial emotion recognition, Ekman, said, I cant control usage [of the technology]. I can only be certain that what Im providing is at least an accurate depiction of when someone is concealing emotion.

There is an ethical consideration and a responsibility for each usage, particularly if a manager is going to act on the findings or infer the employees future behavior. The fact that the technology has not yet fully evolved for workplace application allows time for ethical guidelines to be developed. Foremost among the ethical concerns is privacy. I can see few things more invasive than trying to record someones emotions in a database, said privacy advocate Ginger McCall. Concerns about ethical usage are also critical if managers use the technology to make decisions about employeesfor example, if a manager learns from the software that an employee is unhappy and decides to look for a work reassignment for the employee when the employee is actually unhappy about their spouse. Former U.S. counterterrorism detective Charles Lieberman advises, Recognize [the technologys] limitationsit can lead you in the right direction but is not definitive.

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?