  Automated emotion recognition (AER) technology can detect humans' emotional
states in real-time using facial expressions, voice attributes, text, body
movements, and neurological signals and has a broad range of applications
across many sectors. It helps businesses get a much deeper understanding of
their customers, enables monitoring of individuals' moods in healthcare,
education, or the automotive industry, and enables identification of violence
and threat in forensics, to name a few. However, AER technology also risks
using artificial intelligence (AI) to interpret sensitive human emotions. It
can be used for economic and political power and against individual rights.
Human emotions are highly personal, and users have justifiable concerns about
privacy invasion, emotional manipulation, and bias. In this paper, we present
the promises and perils of AER applications. We discuss the ethical challenges
related to the data and AER systems and highlight the prescriptions for
prosocial perspectives for future AER applications. We hope this work will help
AI researchers and developers design prosocial AER applications.
