0.1 A conversation about measuring emotion and its conclusion: mood  (Page 4/26)

I don't know if you could take this any further than that. Maybe I could classify more about the emotion that is occurring like you suggested. I think what is happening when people experience feeling is a lot more complicated than just saying, "this person is mostly happy, but also a little sad". Think about that, a state of feeling at any one time must be incredibly complex. I would think that this state is dependent on what you are doing right then primarily, or what you've been doing or started doing in the past hour. For instance, if someone said something to you that made you feel bad, then you know the primary feeling is sadness, but what is unique about it you could describe by describing the other person, why that person makes you feel bad, what about the comment they made exactly made you feel bad. That would be the primary emotion in that circumstance. Or if you are mowing a lawn, the primary feeling you would probably be experiencing is the feeling of mowing lawns, unless you are off in your own world thinking about something else anyway. That seems really obvious when I say that - that people feel emotions about what they are doing and each emotion is unique. Maybe you could do - this person is mowing lawns, and he is this much emotional (maybe from reading his eyes to see how emotional he is at that moment), so those emotions must be coming from mowing the lawn. I would think you could make a computer program that could at least read how emotional someone is anyway. Then try to attribute those emotions to what they are doing or have been doing recently.

I mean, if you are doing something, that is probably going to be the primary feeling. If you reflect on that later, then the reflecting will bring up the feeling again. You could try to measure how strongly the person is feeling during one of those two examples, and how strongly they are feeling will probably be feelings for what they were doing or thinking about. I don't know how you could connect the strength of feeling to what they have been doing. They could describe what they think they are feeling, and they could describe how strongly they are feeling in general and try to connect the two.

I mean, try to connect how strongly they are feeling, what they think they are feeling, and what they have been doing.

I think that way you could discover a lot. There are at least two dimensions for feelings, one is how strong it is, the other is what it feels like (apples or oranges). The feeling could be of various types, there could be long-term feelings like depression or the opposite of that. There could be short term feelings maybe like the feeling of mowing a lawn, and there are moment to moment feelings that are things like changes in the tone of a conversation. Feelings could be intellectual or emotional, or other ways of categorizing them such as aggressive feelings or feelings when around machinery. Maybe if you just find good ways of classifying the feelings like that (by observing how similar types of things feel, you could use a more significant, emotional example of something of the same type as a less significant object in order to identify the emotion the less significant object caused in you) so you could measure them better because you did such a good job classifying and comparing them.