Can our typing style reveal our emotions? If we believe researchers here, a new computer programme can recognise people’s emotions based on how they type.

An emotionally intelligent online system can change teaching style or the contents of its lectures to better adapt to a particular student’s emotional state, a team of researchers noted.

The emotions that the programme recognised with the greatest degree of accuracy were joy (87% of the time) and anger (81% of the time).

During the study, researchers asked people to type a block of sample text.

They then analysed the keystrokes and characteristics to see if they could identify any of seven different emotional states – joy, fear, anger, sadness, disgust, shame and guilt.

The researchers used a special type of software that ran in the background to record all keys pressed by the users as well as the users’ press and release times.

The emotion-detecting system could be used in applications like online teaching.

The paper appeared in the journal Behavior & Information Technology.