Recently I came accross an interesting topic called “Emotional Cartography – Edited by Christian Nold”. On their website (where you can also download the whole book in high and low quality) they explain Emotional Cartography as:

Emotional Cartography is a collection of essays from artists, designers, psychogeographers, cultural researchers, futurologists and neuroscientists, brought together by Christian Nold, to explore the political, social and cultural implications of visualising intimate biometric data and emotional experiences using technology.

Christian Nold invented and build a Bio Mapping device, which is a tool recording data from two technologies: a simple biometric sensor measuring  and a Global Positioning System (GPS). The bio-sensor measures changes in the sweat level of the wearers’ fingers. His assumption is that these changes are an indication of ‘emotional’ intensity. But isn’t it in fact arousal?

As Dr. Pieter Desmet (who developed PrEmo as an instrument to measure emotions in a non-verbal way) concludes in this paper on Measuring Emotions (2003):

As there seems to be no empirical solution to the debate on which component is sufficient or necessary to define emotions, at present the most favoured solutions is to say that emotions are best treated as a multifaceted phenomenon consisting of the following components: behavioural reactions (e.g. approaching), expressive reactions (e.g. smiling), physiological reactions (e.g. heart pounding), and subjective feelings (e.g. feeling amused). Each instrument that is claimed to measure emotions in fact measures one of these components.

Nevertheless it’s a very interesting project with very nice visualisations.

Typical visulisation of Bio Mapping data shown in Google Earth. The height of the track indicates the physiological arousal at that point. The annotation was made by the participant. Source: Emotional Cartography edited by Christian Nold (ISBN 978-0-9557623-1-4)

At susaGroup, we envision the same kind of visualisations of the data gathered by CapturEmo, an instrument for emotional experience sampling.

The main difference is that we focus on self report instruments and asking people to express themselves. However, tools like the Bio Mapping Device might be an excellent add-on to trigger a new emotion measurement. Increased arousal surely tells you something is going on.

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