With the help of a psychology professor and a Pixar illustrator, Facebook is trying to make our messages a little more emotional.
In 1872, Charles Darwin published The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, a book that cataloged emotional expressions in humans and their link to the animal world. In the book, Darwin described more than 50 universal emotions. Now Facebook, with the help of a psychologist who studies emotions and a Pixar illustrator, has turned some of the emotions Darwin described in the 19th century into a set of emoticons. The hope: to create emoticons that better capture the vast range of human emotion.
"This all began we were looking at the kind of issues people were reporting to Facebook," Facebook engineer Arturo Bejar tells Popular Science. "The reports had to do with things Facebook didn’t need to act on, but things people should address--what should happen when you say something that’s upsetting to me or put up a photo I didn’t like?"
