Visualizing emotions

November 20, 2008 9:22 AM

How do you ask a stranger (not necessarily fluent in English) to recall and describe their private emotions? A research project visually displays anger, joy, fear, sadness, and love.
posted by desjardins (10 comments total)

I really like how it appears that everyone feels love in their whole body, and it goes out in every direction.
posted by CitrusFreak12 at 9:44 AM on November 20, 2008

This is really really trippy and cool. I started reading one of the paragraphs on the front page without reading the process or any explanation, and it sounded like it was being said by someone really really frustrated trying to explain something as best they could, but just falling short.

Very neat.
posted by Phire at 9:52 AM on November 20, 2008

I pink, pink, red, blue, yellow, teal this. All over my body.
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 10:08 AM on November 20, 2008 [3 favorites has favorites]

Ambrosia: photos, please.

This is a fascinating post, tho. It reminds me a bit of some other emotion-based visualization projects, like We Feel Fine.
posted by LMGM at 12:30 PM on November 20, 2008

If you liked that, take a look at Fleshmap. It uses similar body visualizations concentrating on the emotion desire.
posted by Henrik at 12:46 PM on November 20, 2008

If I could change my username to "new-seeing well-getting party," I probably would.

Either that or "friends no others rejection sad to world."
posted by decagon at 2:31 PM on November 20, 2008

This is a totally great idea. Good, succinct visual correlations.

The drawings of the sensory locus and directionality particularly interested me. Very chakra-like. The colors! wow.

Odd to have to wait for the concept of visualizing emotions by talking with strangers not fluent in English, when realizing this playfully, beautifully, creatively across a number of senses is long overdue in plain old English.

The color palettes are nicely done. A sort of chromatography of feelings.

When I went to google the site with the lovely color combos, ColourLovers, I found another site, Color Matters, that tries to tie emotions to colors but doesn't really cut it creatively.

In Mahayana Buddhist symbolism, the Five Dhyani (meditation) Buddhas have colors that correspond to emotions in their unawakened form and aspects of enlightenment in their awakened form.

white = ignorance/sloth ->all accommodating wisdom
blue = anger -> discriminating awareness->
yellow = greed/pride ->equanimity/equality
red = lust ->discriminating awareness/compassion
green= jealousy ->all accomplishing

There is also the Chinese medicine correlations [pdf]

Love this post.. Thanks desjardins.
posted by nickyskye at 2:33 PM on November 20, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

s/emotions/parts and I'm far more interested in this project.
posted by Wolfdog at 3:21 PM on November 20, 2008

Gorgeous. Love the methodology as well as the result.
Always hard to visualize non discursive attributes.
posted by signal at 5:31 PM on November 20, 2008

not necessarily fluent in English
ya mean johnny foreigner?
posted by krautland at 6:36 PM on November 20, 2008