0.7 A conversation about measuring emotion and its conclusion: mood  (Page 9/26)

So I guess I can add to the list of questions some points about small changes:

1. What were all the small changes in emotion that occurred, and how do these changes relate and contribute to the larger emotions that you were experiencing at the park?
2. If you do not know what all the small changes in emotion were, maybe you can guess what they were by seeing how the small changes (or the larger emotions) might have influenced any of the feelings you experienced at the park (since it all occurred as one event in the same time period).
3. How did the small and large changes in emotion and in your experience at the park influence your other small and large emotions and actions at the park?
4. What happened at the park? Which of what happened at the park were the most significant for you emotionally? Is it just going to the event and the event overall that was emotionally powerful for you and the only emotion you can identify? Or can you identify other small emotions that occurred (if you step back and look at what happened at this event)?

But I think if you were going to want to actually try to measure emotion accurately, the smaller emotions would be too hard to assess. There might be an expression in the eyes for things like "annoyance" "interest" "sadness" or whatever eyes can express, whenever an eye expresses something that a human can figure out - you could ask a computer to measure that same thing. But those would just be things that the person is trying to communicate with their eyes at that moment, it wouldn't necessarily be what they are really feeling. Maybe to try and determine the primary emotions, you could have the person do something fun for an hour, then look at their eyes and determine what changed from before. Wait another hour and do the assessment again. That second assessment would determine how much of the "fun" emotion was still present after an hour. I don't know how many emotions someone could assess like this. You could have someone do something interesting for an hour, then do an assessment of their eyes to see what changed. I don't know how you would assess the eyes if someone did four things in a row (hour after hour) that each were different emotions, say something interesting, then something boring, then something happy or fun, then something sad. Would all of those things be displayed in the eyes at the same time? This would obviously be very slight changes in the eyes that my guess only a computer could pick up. But the change might be consistent for all people - allowing it to be accurate for everyone.

I don't know what this change might be visually - I mentioned the wateriness before. If someone can display an emotion with their eyes on purpose, maybe that would just be a more obvious example of how the eyes could show that. I think eyes change in two ways, one would be what the expression is - the other would be the "heaviness" to the eyes. For instance if someone was tired their eyes might look more drugged up - or if someone was emotional they might be watery. That I think would show the longer term, primary emotions because they have a physical change in the eye, versus just something you are expressing. The primary emotions probably cause a different physical condition that might be able to be read by subtle eye changes. I am not a medical doctor, but I know that if you feel very strongly you also have a physical reaction as well.