Mouse movements are correlated with your mood, study finds.
When you use your computer, you leave many traces of your state of mind: your browsing history, rashly written comments or emails, and your productivity. But new research shows that it may be even more basic than that. Professor Jeffrey Jenkins and his colleagues from Brigham Young University have been studying the way users move their computer mouse, and found that slower and jagged or sudden movements indicate anger or frustration.
"It's counterintuitive; people might think, 'When I'm frustrated, I start moving the mouse faster,'' Jenkins said. "Well, no, you actually start moving slower."
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"Using this technology, websites will no longer be dumb," Jenkins said. "Websites can go beyond just presenting information, but they can sense you. They can understand not just what you're providing, but what you're feeling."
Jenkins believes that applications for this research lie in technology that measures mouse movements, and that information could be used to determine exactly what about and when a website makes users frustrated in order to make necessary modifications.
"Traditionally it has been very difficult to pinpoint when a user becomes frustrated, leading them to not come back to a site," Jenkins said. "Being able to sense a negative emotional response, we can adjust the website experience to eliminate stress or to offer help."
The research team conducted three separate studies. The first looked at the mouse movements of 65 participants who were randomly manipulated to feel frustrated as they completed a number-ordering task. Negative emotions increased the distance and reduced the speed of cursor movements.
In the second study, 126 participants interacted with a mock e-commerce website. Once again, they were randomly manipulated to feel negative emotions. These emotions were inferred with an accuracy of 81.7 percent based on mouse movements.
In the third study, 80 participants reported their changing emotional levels while using an online product configurator. Similar results were found.
This concept is also applicable to touchscreen devices. Although the research on taps and swipes is still fairly new, Jenkins is hopeful that the ever-increasing amount of smartphone and tablet data could lead this research in interesting directions.
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