As a team we wanted to examine how computational practises and art related to emotion and empathy.
Examining bibliography we focused on Kinesthetic empathy and simulation theory
Authors in the area of kinesthetic empathy have suggested that it is possible to experience empathy based only on observing the movements of another human being (Reynolds and Reason 2012), and that when we see someone experiencing an emotion, we simulate it (Freedberg and Gallese 2007).
This theory helped us form the experiment from which we will take the emotion responses.
Requesting ourselves why we wanted to examine emotions we fund that we all find emotions a very important part of our lives and ourselves. Therefore, we support our beliefs by quoting Peter Lang “ they are dispositions and not the acts themselves: They reflect central activation and preparation for action.
Looking for projects and artefacts that would help us develop our ideas we came across Tina Gonsalves.
Her projects influenced a lot our research as we fund a lot of common ideas and useful practises that we could use in our experiment.
For example:
Her use of Galvanic Skin Response for measuring emotion response has empower our idea of using it in our practise.
She supports the use of GSR by saying :
“Feelings, arousal responses, and expressions interact closely. Subjectively, we know that states of physiological excitement alter our emotions.”
““true” emotions are nevertheless evident in a pattern of internal bodily responses”
Sentiment Analysis
Along with the GSR method of measuring the emotional response we wanted to observe the linguistic expression of emotion, as we believe that verbal expression could reveal different emotion response.
Our goal is to compare see how the two responses differ.
According to Chafale and Pimpalkar:
“The aim of sentiment analysis is to determine the attitude of a person with respect to some topic.”
One way to do sentiment analysis is by gathering verbal responses to certain questions and analysing them according to a subset of Plutchik’s Wheel of emotions.
Ethics
Having set as a goal for this project to examine how people experience emotion and having emotion as the centre of the study, we made the decision to use this sensitive material. We examine the theory of witnessing places in crises with the help of technological means according to Nishat Awan and we conclude that various artists but also from mainstream means of communication such as social media, websites and television have been using such material very often nowadays.
“the whole world to the various social media platforms that transmit images and videos”
“we must pay attention to the ways in which places become visible at a distance, and what that visibility does or does not allow us to apprehend and therefore to do”
Therefore we concluded that this is a blunt way of getting an emotional response, but that makes it a good starting point of a future study.
References:
Awan, N. (2016). Digital Narratives and Witnessing: The Ethics of Engaging with Places at a Distance. GeoHumanities, 2(2), pp.311-330.
Chafale, D. & Pimpalkar, A. (2014). Review on Developing Corpora for Sentiment Analysis Using Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions with Fuzzy Logic. International Journal of Computer Sciences and Engineering, 2(10), pp.14-18.
Freedberg, D. and Gallese, V. (2007). Motion, Emotion and Empathy in Esthetic Experience. Trends Cogn Sci., 11(5), pp.197-203.
Gonsalves, T. (2010). Empathy and interactivity. Computers in Entertainment, 8(1), pp.1-14.
Lang, P. (1995). The emotion probe: Studies of motivation and attention. American Psychologist, 50(5), 372-385.
Reynolds, D., & Reason, M. (2012). Kinesthetic empathy in creative and cultural practices. Bristol: Intellect.