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Centre for Design Research © 2008
Benedict Singleton and Dr. Kev Hilton
The Emotional Spectrum Analyser
Centre for Design Research © 2008
Introduction
• ‘Understanding’ changes our beliefs and needs
• From design of effective product interfaces, to affective products.
• From a historical lack of interest, to perceived competitive advantage for product innovation.
• This developed a need to reliably quantify emotions and develop technical solutions.
Emotional Spectrum Analysis
• ESA16 software, using electro-encephalogram technology
Centre for Design Research © 2008
Contemporary Conceptions
• Emotional state is complex and difficult to articulate
• Often characterised as a blending or layering of core emotions
• Technologists looked for solutions to provide a ‘Cognitive representation’ of a ‘Physiological state’.
• However, emotion is led by changing context or situation and environment, a potentially ‘chaotic’ multi-factorial system of influence.
Emotional Spectrum Analysis
Centre for Design Research © 2008
Contemporary Conceptions
• ‘Pure’ emotions, e.g. anger or happiness, can still be used as discussion points around Emotional Space (Russell and Feldman Barratt, 1999).
• However, mono-dimensional models do not adequately represent the complexity of emotional evidence for effective application to design.
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Assessing Emotion Objectively
• ‘Objective’ observation of participant’s emotions is unreliable.
• Self-report of emotions has also proven unreliable (Turkkan, 2000).
• Post-hoc categorization of emotions is problematic.
This has led to discussions around ‘universal’ words and images.
Assessing Emotion Objectively
PrEmo V5 (Desmet, 2002)
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Assessing Emotion Objectively
Kansei Engineering, scaling experience
Happiness Sadness
Fast Slow
X
X
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Assessing Emotion Objectively
• These approaches still require ‘reflective’ reporting.
• There is a need to record data in real-time.
• Technology might work in combination with universals to develop this field of knowledge.
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Physiological Traces of Emotion
• Reliable automatic means of monitoring immersive experiences.
• ‘Immersion’ and ‘verbalizing’ tasks distract one another.
• Neuroscience technologies, such as ESA may provide the physical means.
• Universals need to be further developed to provide reliable cross-cultural categorization.
• However we still face the complexity of influences on experience.
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Physiological Traces of Emotion
• There is no simple way to map neural activity onto emotion (Prohovnik et al, 2004).
• The Brain Function Laboratory’s ESA software takes an orthogonally rotated approach to mapping four independent and dissimilar forms of neural activity.
• Labeling them with the ‘state’ terms which were commonly used in self-report.
• It is of course the universality and applicability of these terms which challenge development.
Physiological Traces of Emotion
Centre for Design Research © 2008
Physiological Traces of Emotion
• Emotional intensity on the recording does not consistently match the experienced, ‘remembered’, intensity.
• BFL stated that it is not possible to compare one individual’s recordings against another individual’s, only against their own.
Physiological Traces of Emotion
Centre for Design Research © 2008
Conclusion
• The hope of ESA-16 providing a non-invasive emotional assessment.
• Products do elicit emotional responses but reflection upon these responses can distort the memory of these emotions.
• However, designers and technologists first need an validated model of emotion in order to progress.
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Conclusion
• It was therefore concluded that in the short term, this technology might be repurposed for monitoring other physiological changes, used for enquiries into immersive experiences, for example, computer gaming.
• The ESA-16 might be viewed as a stepping stone towards a clearer understanding of experiences.
• Nevertheless, a key question for further investigation that came out of this project was ‘just how reliable are our emotional responses to product?’
Centre for Design Research © 2008
Dr. Kev Hilton (k.hilton@northumbria.ac.uk)