Anyone who’s ever owned a computer has, at some point or another, been frustrated with it. Whether it’s the blue screen of death or the dreaded pinwheel, we’ve all perhaps mashed the keyboard, slammed our mouse down on its pad, or clicked aggressively on our track pad hoping to magically fix our problem. 
 
 Now research suggests that you’re showing your anger in a more subtle way: changing the way you actually move your cursor. And Web designers may be able to use this data to determine if Web pages are not user friendly. 
 
 In a study published in Management Information Systems Quarterly, researchers monitored people’s cursor movements to determine if they changed when people were frustrated, and if they could use those movements alone to predict a user’s emotional state. 
 
 The researchers had to first reliably piss people off in order for their experiments to work. So they created everyday computer frustrations like making a page take forever to load, only to eventually fail. They also had participants try to answer timed questions, but designed the questions to be too complicated to answer in a short amount of time. When time was up, the page advanced automatically. 
 
 They found that instead of moving the cursor in a nice, smooth arc, frustrated people moved the mouse in more sporadic, jagged motions. Others moved the mouse more slowly. 
 
 In their report, the researchers said that they think the behavior can be explained by the attentional control theory (ACT), which posits that people experiencing negative emotions shift from acting in a goal-driven manner to a stimulus-responsive manner. Basically, you go from focusing on what you want to the thing that’s upsetting you. 
 
 A happy Internet user will move his or her mouse in a direct, precise manner to achieve a particular goal. A frustrated Internet user will be too distracted by whatever’s getting on their nerves to browse in an easy way, the study suggests. 
 
 “Using this technology, websites will no longer be dumb,” study author Jeff Jenkins said in a press release. “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.” 
 
 In fact a small startup has already patented Jenkins’ technology, the press release said. 
 
 Hopefully the technology will be used for good, and not for evil things like an Orwellian dystopian future where our every emotional whim is monitored by the government, or advertisers. 
 
 Photo via Brigham and Young University Photography 

 Most people can tell if you’re angry based on the way you’re acting. Professor Jeffrey Jenkins can tell if you’re angry by the way you move a computer mouse. 
 
 The BYU information systems expert says people experiencing anger (and other negative emotions—frustration, confusion, sadness) become less precise in their mouse movements and move the cursor at different speeds. 
 
 Thanks to advances in modern technology, Jenkins can now gather and process enough data points from your cursor movement to measure those deviations and indicate your emotional state. 
 
 “Using this technology, websites will no longer be dumb,” he 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.” 
 
 According to his research, when users are upset or confused, the mouse no longer follows a straight or gently curving path. Instead, movements become jagged and sudden. Additionally, someone exhibiting negative emotions moves a mouse slower. 
 
 “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.” 
 
 Jenkins believes the greatest application of his research (and resulting technology that measures mouse movements) is that web developers will be able to adapt or fix sore points in websites that bring out negative emotions. 
 
 In other words, now the folks running the online ticket website that drives you bonkers will know exactly when you throw up your hands and scream. 
 
 “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.” 
 
 Jenkins’ technology has been patented and spun off to a local startup company that holds the license. Now he’s in the process of refining it, with details of his latest research appearing in top information systems academic journal MIS Quarterly. 
 
 Jenkins said the concept can also be applied to mobile devices, where swipes and taps replace mouse movement. Although he is still in the early stages of looking at mobile devices, he is encouraged by the massive amounts of data phones and tablets are providing. 

 In a move akin to Google’s efforts to help you avoid drunk e-mailing, computer scientists are now trying to keep you happy while using the Web—by gauging when you get ticked off. 
 
 From three different experiments, researchers found that Internet users who became frustrated, confused, or upset while online tended to move their cursor sporadically and less precisely, instead of in smooth strokes. Perturbed users also tended to navigate their mouse more slowly, not faster as some might expect. The findings, reported in the information systems journal MIS Quarterly, may allow computer scientists or website developers to identify and intervene in real time when users become agitated with the interface or content of a site. 
 
 "Using this technology, websites will no longer be dumb," Jeff Jenkins, lead study author and an information systems professor at Brigham Young University, said in a press release. "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." 
 
 For their emotional surfing studies, Jenkins and colleagues randomly frustrated 65 participants from Amazon’s crowdsourcing marketplace Mechanical Turk as they carried out a number-ordering task. By monitoring their cursor movements, the researchers found that when users were peeved their cursor distance increased and speed decreased, which Jenkins admitted was a bit counterintuitive. 
 
 Still, taking the information into account, the researchers then did a similar experiment, randomly frustrating 126 different participants as they clicked around on a mock e-commerce site. Eyeing their cursor movements, the researchers could identify when a user was annoyed with nearly 82 percent accuracy. 
 
 In a third and final experiment, another 80 participants reported their emotional levels as they interacted with a potentially frustrating online tool for customizing a product. The researchers found that cursor movement could not only give away negative emotions, but also the level of negative emotion. 
 
 Jenkins hopes that the new method of monitoring users' emotions could help Web developers iron out problematic features on websites that drive away Web traffic. “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." 
 
 In future work, he aims to come up with a similar way to measure negative emotions of mobile device users.
– We may like to think that we are indescribably complex emotional creatures, but computer scientists at Brigham Young University are finding that they can accurately predict one side of ourselves—our dark, angry side—simply by tracking the way we move a mouse while on a computer. "Using this technology, websites will no longer be dumb," lead researcher Jeffrey Jenkins says. "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." Reporting in the journal MIS Quarterly, the researchers say this ability could enable web developers to, say, fix the parts of web experiences that consistently frustrate the masses. To test this, Jenkins and colleagues engaged dozens of computer users in three experiments, reports Ars Technica. First, they randomly antagonized 65 Mechanical Turk users and monitored their cursors; the more frustrated users moved their cursors more sporadically and, counterintuitively, more slowly. Next they randomly annoyed 126 different participants on a mock e-commerce site and found that they spotted the frustrated users with 82% accuracy. Finally, they asked 80 participants to report their emotions while using an online tool, and this is where they were able to gauge the level of negative emotion, too. Jenkins has already patented the tech, and is working on extending it to touchscreens. Fine, so long as it's not used "for evil things like an Orwellian dystopian future where our every emotional whim is monitored by the government, or advertisers," warns the Daily Dot. (How about Microsoft's attempt to track our faces?)