0.1 A conversation about measuring emotion and its conclusion: mood  (Page 5/26)

I mean think about it this way, the only way to measure emotion would be to ask about the strength of the emotion. Maybe you could have a computer compare expression in the eyes to how strongly someone described their emotions were being felt at that time. That might seem awkward, asking someone, "how strongly were you feeling right then". I don't know if people would really know the answer to that. I mean, if someone doesn't know that they are depressed or not, how could you possibly come up with a reliable way to measure that emotion? The only way I can think of is to design specific tests that might evoke the proper emotions, like a ink blot test that was designed to bring out the emotion depression or not - or another test that was designed to bring out what that person was feeling right then (maybe of a certain type). Then you could have a computer measure expression or change in the eyes.

The complicated thing would be classifying what type of feeling it is. It would be hard for someone to assess the strength of the feeling or how short or long term the feeling is (seconds, hours, days etc), but it would probably be harder to describe what it feels like exactly. Though I could still probably come up with a list of ways of classifying the feeling - I already mentioned intellectual, emotional, aggressive. I don't know if someone would really understand those things in a way they can actually feel and experience, but someone could still guess that the feeling was composed of certain aspects. For instance if you are in a house you could say that the person might be experiencing feelings related to houses. Maybe there are a few major types of feelings (that are more descriptive than just the defined emotions and feelings at least). Those could reveal more specifically what someone is feeling and that would be more like you are measuring their emotions. If someone is experiencing affection, for example, maybe you could more accurately assess how much affection they are experiencing if you identified some of the key emotion generators for people (like if they were around machinery, or in a house). Then you could say, well this person was around machinery in a house, so they must have at least been experiencing this much emotion because those objects usually generate a lot of emotion for people. If you assess the circumstance the person is in and label everything that could be generating emotion, maybe there are only a few things in life that are key emotion generators (types of emotion I guess). For instance if you are trying to measure how much envy someone is experiencing, you could have labeled certain things as key for generating the feeling of envy that would also help classify the type of emotion it is (or the type of envy feeling). If you understood that sibling rivalry was significant, then you could say that a lot of envy was generated in this instance because the two people were siblings. I guess what I am saying is you could label everything in life that clearly generates emotion, such as things such as sibling rivalry, houses, machinery, people being aggressive, and you could then use these things as tools to identify how much emotion someone is experiencing. You could do this because you have an understanding of each of these key things of how much emotion they generate because they are significant things of which you really understand, or feel in a way how significant they are and how much emotion they generate. So it is like I said before, compare the emotion or experience you want to measure to things where you know what the emotion felt like, which would probably be anything significant, basically.