Once More, With Feeling: Expressing Emotional Intensity in Touchscreen Gestures

In this paper, we explore how people use touchscreens to express emotional intensity, and whether these intensities can be understood by oneself at a later date or by others. In a controlled study, 26 participants were asked to express a set of emotions mapped to predefined gestures, at range of different intensities. One week later, participants were asked to identify the emotional intensity visualized in animations of the gestures made by themselves and by other participants. Our participants expressed emotional intensity using gesture length, pressure, and speed primarily; the choice of attributes was impacted by the specific emotion, and the range and rate of increase of these attributes varied by individual and by emotion. Recognition accuracy of emotional intensity was higher at extreme ends, and was higher for one's own gestures than those made by others. The attributes of size and pressure (mapped to color in the animation) were most readily interpreted, while speed was more difficult to differentiate. We discuss human gesture drawing patterns to express emotional intensities and implications for developers of annotation systems and other touchscreen interfaces that wish to capture affect.