Rulers to measure emotions
Written by Gijs Huisman on 6/04/2010
Reading others’ emotions by looking at their face is something we do intuitively. Still, sometimes a little bit of help may be appreciated.
From smile to :)
Written by Gijs Huisman on 29/03/2010The humble emoticon may seem far removed from the complexities of facial expression analysis. Well, not anymore Someone has seen fit to build an app that uses your webcam to detect a smile and send a smiley to the program you’re working with.
Interesting study: Chimps mirror emotions in cartoons
Written by Marco van Hout on 17/03/2010Today, I stumbled upon an interesting article that refers to research done at Emory University. The study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, is part of an effort to learn more about the impact of cartoons and video games on the human brain.
“Humans experience emotional engagement with animated characters, empathizing with happiness, sadness or other emotions displayed by the characters”
To understand why humans relate to artificial characters in this way, they set out to determine if chimpanzees would respond empathetically to virtual characters. The researchers used contagious yawning to test empathetic response. “Yawns are contagious in the same way other emotional responses, like smiles, frowns and fear, are contagious,” said Matthew Campbell, the lead researcher.
The chimps yawned significantly more in response to 3D animations of yawning than they did to animated chimps making control mouth movements.
Be happy, scroll up!
Written by Gijs Huisman on 16/03/2010
At least, that’s what a recent study by Casasanto and Dijkstra (2010) seems to hint at.
The researchers wanted to investigate whether physical actions can influence the retrieval of emotional memories. Specifically, they wanted to find out if, different from actions like, sitting up, frowning, or smiling, actions not directly related to emotions would help in emotional memory retrieval.
Competitive tool for measuring emotions lacks diversity in expressions
Written by Marco van Hout on 15/03/2010[note: please beware of sarcasm in this post]
At SusaGroup, we think it is very important to keep looking and researching other types of tools that are developed for measuring the emotional experience of people. Today, we were pointed towards a possible competitive tool that uses the face of a ‘famous’ actor to express emotions, where we choose to use a validated cartoon character (see PrEmo, or LEM).
We think that this competitor will prove to be no competition for our instruments, as it lacks a certain diversity in the facial expressions that are depicted…
Please click on read the rest of this article to see the interface of this instrument.
Emotional (or arousal?) cartography
Written by Lars Rengersen on 10/03/2010Recently 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?
TED talk – Daniel Kahneman: The riddle of experience vs. memory
Written by Lars Rengersen on 9/03/2010Today I found an interesting TED talk video about experience versus memory which is very interesting and relevant for the kind of work we do at SusaGroup.
Cognitive traps make it almost impossible to think straight about happiness. One of the main reasons is confusion between experience and memory. Being happy in your life versus being happy with your life.
Our memories tell us stories,. Stories are what we get to keep from our experiences. The way we memorize is strongly influenced by the end of an experience. Stories are created by changes, significant events and endings. Our experiencing selves lives its life continuously. It has moments of experiences, one after the other. A question Daniel Kahneman asks is “What happens to these moments?”. His answer is: “Nothing, they are lost forever.”. Most of them do not leave a trace to our remembering selves.
For us at SusaGroup it is interesting to think about it. We believe that by enriching experiences and “designing for emotion” we make sure that experiences become significant.
Emotion Battle – the results: Oscar nominee movie trailers
Written by Marco van Hout on 5/03/2010And the winner is…! We wish it was that easy, measuring emotions means dealing with the complexity of people. This complexity was nicely reflected in our study using the trailers for the Oscar nominees for Best Motion Picture. 182 People participated in our online experiment using our emotion self-report instrument PrEmo. Each participant was shown the movie trailers of each nominee (ten in total) and was asked to indicate to which extend they experienced the depicted 6 emotions while viewing the clip.
Emotion Battle: The Oscar Nominees
Written by Gijs Huisman on 3/03/2010In a few days we will find out which movie will receive the famous golden statue and be crowned ‘Best Motion Picture’.
If you like, you can read up on the criteria that The Academy uses to select a winner. At SusaGroup however, we are much more interested in which movie will win in an Emotion Battle.
We would like your help with this. So please, click on the following link and participate in our experiment.
Accelerating the service economy by making emotional connections
Written by Lars Rengersen on 25/02/2010On Businessweek.com I found an interesting article “The Netherlands’ Drive to Build a Service Economy” by Jeneanne Rae. She concludes that service innovation needs new inputs and stresses the need to empathize with customers. For us at SusaGroup this is a confirmation of the things we do. We even believe that to make a difference you need to connect on an emotional level with people.
It’s about focusing on improving and innovating services as a smart way to foster economic growth. The article builds on the prestigious annual Innovation Lecture of Minister of Economic Affairs Maria Van Der Hoeve, about the need to steer the typical conversation about innovation away from technology and products towards services.