A new extension on Facebook allows users to have a better way to convey their feelings to their friends and followers. No more feeling “happy” when you’re enthusiastic or mildly pleased – now you can let your description go wild.

Following its recent emotion contagion experiment – which ended up receiving a batch of negative feedback – Brooklyn artist and programmer Lauren McCarthy put together a new Google Chrome Extension that allows users to expand how they’re feeling, rather than just the usual facial basics.

With the Facebook Mood Manipulator, feelings go much deeper than users could convey on the previous system, which was put together by Facebook’s Data Science Team. Gone are the ways to manipulate users feeling through word omission algorithms, and in their place are filters that run through a linguistic analysis, run by the Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (or LIWC), a text-analysis software put together by researchers at the University of Texas in Austin.

A white box called the Moon Manipulator appears on the screen (in the corner) and asks users “How do you like to feel ” From there, they can adjust four sliding scales: Positive, Emotional, Negative and Open. By adjusting these with “less” and “more” settings, they’re more accurately able to describe their feelings using the same text analysis software as before, but with far greater results.

By having said tool in their possession, users have a better way to keep control of their social media feeds, and also displays what people see on their social media feeds, and how they feel about it overall.

With the new program, McCarthy asks, “Why should Zuckerberg get to decide how you feel ” and then explains that people can “manipulate your emotions on your own terms.”

What do you think Will you give the new emotion meter a try, or stick with the typical smiley-faces

Source: PSFK