A market for emotions
Emotions can be powerful for individuals. But they’re also powerful tools for content creators, such as advertisers, marketers, and filmmakers. By tracking people’s negative or positive feelings toward ads — via traditional surveys and focus groups — agencies can tweak and tailor their content to better satisfy consumers. Increasingly, over the past several years, companies developing emotion-recognition technology — which gauges subconscious emotions by analyzing facial cues — have aided agencies on that front. Prominent among these companies is MIT spinout Affectiva, whose advanced emotion-tracking software, called Affdex, is based on years of MIT Media Lab research. Today, the startup is attracting some big-name clients, including Kellogg and Unilever. Backed by more than $20 million in funding, the startup — which has amassed a vast facial-expression database — is also setting its sights on a “mood-aware” Internet that reads a user’s emotions to shape content. This could lead, for example, to more relevant online...