Emotion representation and physiology assignments in digital systems

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Fig. 2. Mixed emotions in a two-dimensional space, E1–E3 being mixed emotions with unique physiological
patterns. Emotion word categories are shown for orientation only. Remember that these are in fact subjectively
chosen categories with arbitrary positions and blurry borders.
4.2. Labelling emotions
As we worked out in sections 2 and 3, naming emotions with words is
problematic. For instance, just as the word anger can describe many emotional states,
the words that describe a certain type of anger can have very different meanings as
well (for instance, anger plus anxiety plus depression when confronted with loss of
important data). Adding to this that the category borders are blurry, we suggest to
abandon labelling emotions with words.
Whenever studies resulted in a structure that showed emotion words placed in a
coordinate system (e.g. Russell, 1983; Morgan and Heise, 1988; Västfjäll et al., 2000; and
many others), they all assumed that the list of words given to the subjects to rate their
emotion contains words that are universal as to the extend that everyone will associate the
same feelings with them. But with Wierzbicka’s and Russell’s findings of intercultural
differences in the existence of emotion words (Russell, 1991; Wierzbicka, 1992)wedonot
support this assumption of universality. We go as far as to propose even individual
intracultural differences in the understanding of different emotions, especially in
connection with computers.
On the contrary, we do assume the concept of dimensions being universal. Therefore, if
it is true that emotions can be described with dimensions only, it should be possible to
identify a person’s inner state simply by using these dimensions without using emotion
words. The emotion could simply be labelled by its position in the coordinate system.
4.3. Practical implementation
This section describes a possible application of the new approach to demonstrate its
applicability. It is explained how it could be used to explore correlates between