The future of emotions: Trends & emerging issues
In the last post, I introduced the series of four different future scenarios on emotions. Here, we’ll take a quick look at present trends and emerging issues to give us context for what’s happening now and some technologies that might influence the future of emotions.
Trends
Wearables
The Feel wristband maps emotions according to valence (attraction or aversion), arousal and control via temperature and heart rate. Beyond the tracking of your emotional states, the app provides users with guidance on how to achieve their mental well being goals. A more indirect pathway to emotion control, Spire Stone tracks your breathing patterns to identify stress and encourage you to take a moment to breathe deeper and clear your mind.
Emotion-management Apps
The tracking and management of emotions is well tended to with various apps such as Headspace (management through meditation) and Moodnotes.
The apps enable:
- Stress reduction through identification/acknowledgement of emotions
- Moodnotes provides prompts to guide you towards healthier thinking/feeling patterns
- Free up the mind to allow room for new emotions
- Mood tracking and checking in with oneself, which is helpful for people in general, and for those suffering from depression or mental illness
Biometrics
Body language has been around longer than verbal language. Yet, humans are about 72% accurate at reading emotions from facial expressions, while computer vision is up to 82% accurate. Apple’s purchase of Emotient demonstrates the tech sectors’ appreciation of emotion detection. They want their products to be able to detect feelings such as happiness, surprise, sadness, anger, disgust, fear and contempt — all types of emotions that may not come through in a survey or traditional means.
Emojis
“72% of 18–24 year olds find it easier and more effective to express themselves with emojis.” These emotional icons make up for the absence of body language, gesture and intonation in the digital realm. People are finding innovative ways to use them beyond texting: A British bank replaced PINs with emojis for mobile banking access and found that the emojis provided a higher level of security (more possible combinations) and their customers could remember their PINs more easily.
IoT: Internet of Things
The Internet of Things provides an opportunity (or cautionary tale of privacy invasion) to an urban and rural environment with cameras and sensors that use a distributed network to read expressions, gestures, posture, heart rate and much more.
Emerging Issues
Emotion Artificial Intelligence
Emotion AI encompasses our emotional interface with machines, and our ability to make our machines more emotional. Whether embedded or invisible systems (much like Scarlett Johansson’s character in “Her”) or in the form of robots, EAI can detect early signs of autism, cultivate deeper scholastic engagement with students, and engage the elderly.
Affective Computing
“Affective Computing research combines engineering and computer science with psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, sociology, education, psychophysiology, value-centered design, ethics, and more.” By balancing emotion and cognition in technologies such as alertness detection systems in vehicles, immersive gaming, and PTSD treatment in soldiers, affective computing is the foundation of EAI.
Generation Z
“Generation Z, as they have been coined, consist of those born in 1995 or later.” They are largely more interested in face-to-face interactions, are less likely to be seduced by gadgets and technology, yet because they are “social machine natives” (like digital natives, but more embedded in the social fabric), use technology more and with less trust issues to technology than any previous generation.
Evolving Gender
People’s attachment to ideas of 100% “male” and “female” genders are diminishing and changing. People who identify as gender fluid is increasing. Seventeen year-old Tyler Ford says, “I have been out as an agender, or genderless, person for about a year now. To me, this simply means having the freedom to exist as a person without being confined by the limits of the western gender binary.”
Surveillance Capitalism
“Surveillance capitalism uses illegible mechanisms of extraction, commodification, and control of behavior to produce new markets of behavioral prediction and modification.” In order for people to feel comfortable with their emotions online, on a platform, etc., they must have some level of trust in the medium. Continually being tracked may threaten the ease of sharing, expressing or feeling emotions in spaces that are known to be monitored.
About The Frameworks
The four futures you’ll see are structured with the Three-Horizon frameworks — a method of modeling current and future attitudes. The frameworks aim to identify characteristics of undefined technologies, systems or approaches. All four scenarios look towards the preferable future where emotions are utilized in new and different ways.
