Study of automatic prediction of emotion from handwriting samples

Handwriting biometrics has a long history, especially when the handwritten signature is the target, but it has also proved possible to use handwriting as a basis for the prediction of various non-unique but forensically useful characteristics of the writer, generally considered to be examples of so-called ‘soft biometrics’. Most commonly, these are characteristics such as the age or gender of the writer, but the predictive capabilities arising in handwriting offer wider opportunities for trait prediction. This study presents a preliminary investigation of the use of handwriting to predict information about the writer relating specifically to higher level characteristics such as emotional state. The authors present an initial study to demonstrate that this is possible, and explore a number of factors particularly relevant to the use of such a capability in areas of forensic investigation.