MIT's Media Lab Invents New Emotion
                                                           August 20, Reuters

     Professor Kindra Tanakawa, from the Human/Computer Interactive Networking group
at MIT's media lab invented a new emotion yesterday.
""I call it 'surfused.'  It's like a cross between being surprised and confused.,"
said Tanakawa.  
     The group has been attempting to discover new emotions since 1996, when associate 
professor Ronald Serita discovered warippy, a 'kind of wary happiness.'  However,
since the initial excitement, there has been little activity in the field of emotion 
discovery.
     Tanakawa has high hopes that surfused will bring the world's attention back to 
the exciting field of emotion discovery, and hopefully inspire others to do 
similar work.  
     Although most new emotions are discovered by accident, Serita hopes to work 
with Tanakawa to bring a method to the madness.  "I think that we can come up 
with some rules for inventing new emotions," said Serita.  "There are fundamental
principles behind every scientific field, and this should be no exception."
     Although emotion discovery is deceptively simple, the process of inventing or
discovering a new emotion is very in depth, tedious, and difficult.  Scientists 
often examine tens or even hundreds of prospective emotions before finding a valid
new emotion.  Tanakawa says "Before I discovered surfused, I was testing a prospective
called 'happyfear.'  Looking back, I now realize it couldn't possible have been a
proper emotion.  However, at the time, I had to test it using about forty different 
methods before I could positively rule it out."