by Mark Ollig
Those
of you in high school during the mid-1970s will no doubt remember seeing them
being worn by other students.
Mood
rings were all the rage in pop culture starting around 1975.
When
I was a sophomore in high school, many of the kids were wearing mood rings, or
asking to wear one “to see if they really worked.”
When
worn, the liquid crystal underneath the clear capsule covering on the ring
would change colors based upon the “mood” or state of mind of the wearer.
It
was said the color really changed because of the variance in body and
surrounding air temperature.
However,
it was more fun believing the mood ring was changing colors due to the emotions
of the wearer.
A
person wearing a mood ring was in a relaxed, calm, stress-free mood if the
ring’s color was green or blue.
A
yellowish color meant a person was in a state of heightened creativity, or in a
light-hearted, humorous, happy, and fun mood.
Red
was an indication of increased physical energy, stamina, passion, and vitality.
Brown
was a sign of being nervous, and edgy.
Black
suggested the ring wearer was in a tense, anxious, or overworked mood.
Gray
revealed the person was under stress.
So,
your question is whether yours truly wore a mood ring? Yes, of course I tried
one on.
I
recall the mood ring turning blue, signifying I was in a relaxed, peaceful
state. Of course, I tried it on outside during the winter when the temperature
was cold, so the bluish color was probably attributable to this.
Mood
rings eventually went the way of the pet rock craze, although they remained a
fashion accessory for a long time.
There’s
an old saying, “What goes around, comes around.”
Let’s
welcome back today’s new and improved individual mood sensor.
Yes
indeed folks but this time it’s not a ring.
It’s
a new smartphone app (application) advertised as Emotion Sense.
This
app keeps track of a user’s emotions and moods via its algorithmic, behavioral
pattern recognition abilities.
This
is a free app, and is currently available for your Android smartphone.
Emotion
Sense is the psychology research project being conducted by the University of
Cambridge.
“Mobile
phones represent an ideal computing platform to monitor behavior and movement,
since they are part of the everyday life of billions of people,” as stated by a
paper from the University of Cambridge Computer Lab.
In
the past, savvy Internet social media users continually recorded, and
publically broadcasted their daily life activities by wearing a video camera
and voice recorder linked to the Internet.
This
was called lifecasting.
Lifecaster’s
would broadcast in real-time to an online social network their personally
recorded diary, where it was viewed by the online public.
The
University of Cambridge mentioned this, but said the persons monitoring their
own behavior knew it was being monitored; in fact, they were probably overly
aware of it, leading to biased psychology results when analyzed.
Mobile
phones provide a more “unobtrusive” means of attaining the user’s true
emotional behavior and interactions, states the paper.
User
information is gathered from the output of the monitoring sensors in a
smartphone.
Specific
sensors are used to monitor a user’s speech, and recognize emotional behavior.
Each
monitoring sensor will log all events into a “knowledge base,” which stores all
the information obtained from the sensors within the smartphone.
Emotion
Sense was designed by psychologists for everyday users, and patients being
treated to chart their feelings.
The
Emotion Sense app also interacts with a user by asking them to assess how they
feel, using an “emotion grid” user feedback questionnaire.
Depending
upon the user’s response, the smartphone app will then conduct a brief
interactive survey, to focus more on the user’s particular emotional state.
Social
psychology experiments will have a new perspective from the use of mobile
sensing technology. Mobile sensing technology has the potential to provide
better accuracy, and thus better results, according to the Cambridge University
paper.
Cambridge
University researchers collected 24 hours’ worth of information from 12 users
who wore a Nokia 6210 mobile phone with Emotion Sense technology.
This
information was run through various psychological benchmark tests.
“Behind
the scenes, smartphones are constantly collecting data that can turn them into
a key medical and psychological tool. Any smartphone now comes with numerous
sensors that can tell you about aspects of your life, like how active you are,
or how sociable you have been in the past 24 hours. In the long term, we hope
to be able to extract that data so that, for example, it can be used for
therapeutic purposes,” explained Dr. Neal Lathia, a researcher with the
University of Cambridge Computer Lab.
The
research paper concludes by saying the real-time information collected can be
used by social scientists to recognize a person’s pattern of interaction, and
provide psychological help for an individual user, or a patient.
To
read the complete University of Cambridge paper about using mobile telephone
sensing technology for social psychology research, go to
http://tinyurl.com/cd2nfo6.
For
a description of the Emotion Sense Android smartphone app, check out http://emotionsense.org.
