Goal

Emotions considerably influence sensory intake, detection of threatening stimuli, behavioral responses, decision making, memory for important events, and interpersonal interactions. Difficulties in processing and expressing emotions generally ends in depression. Depression is a serious mental deficit around the world: 99% of the mental illnesses refers to depression. In contrast, individuals who have developed effective emotion regulation (ER) strategies have a high Emotional Intelligence (EI), and a higher quality of life. Individuals with high EI are mentally and physically healthier. They have (1) less mood deterioration; (2) less prolonged arousal in response to negative situations; (3) are less likely to suffer from chronic arousal on physical health; and (4) experience better quality and more refreshing sleep.
Human beings are capable of improving their ER process in order to increase their quality of life. Namely, if human beings learn how to modify the type, intensity, time course and quality of emotional responses, they will be eventually able to efficiently identify, understand, express, regulate and use their own emotions and those of others. This project pursues to develop assistive technology that help us to improve emotional self-awareness, emotional self-control, motivation, positive outlook, empathy, and conflict management.

Opportunity

There is plenty of literature regarding the characterization of physiological response related to emotional experiences such as the automatic detection of basic emotions. However, the characterization is only our first step. Our goal is to teach individuals how to develop their own strategies to improve their ER by using their physiological information. For example, we can learn how to modulate our heart activity by our respiration, what furthermore, are highly associated with arousal in negative situations. This human flourishing practice can increase their alternatives on how to react to their own emotions therefore, improving their overall well being.

Roadblocks

Some of the challenges that we must face are the following three:
1. The inability to form a consensus regarding the philosophical underpinnings of the concept of emotion, especially between a multidisciplinary and multicultural perspectives.
2. The association of two very different variables in nature: psychological (e.g, ER and EI) and physiological (e.g., cardiac activity and breathing rate) ones.
3. The study of physiological signals is not standardized yet for emotion regulation and can provide bias in the results.
4. The method used to induce an emotional state that could be much more genuine that previously proposed ones.

Breakthroughs Needed

Some of the activities being undertaken to pave the path are:
1. Learning from others: Advances in biomedical technology and artificial intelligence have proved being useful when testing the feasibility of hypotheses regarding emotion recognition and prediction.
2. Innovation: To structure innovative methods that simulate real life social experiences, such as emotion induction by human voice.
3. A good theoretical framework: A good theoretical knowledge of both physiological processes and psychological theories will help to reach a good interpretation of results accuracy.
4. Transparency and Openness: To make public our findings and data banks, and ask for expertise feedback

Key Indicators of Success

The assessment of the project will be undertaken at each period on the basis of:
• Over 3 years: Identification of emotional experience patterns established by means of physiological responses and ER mechanism in use for a specific population (e.g., young healthy men), along with explanatory (causal) hypotheses.
• Over 5 years: Design and implementation of cost-effective and ecological experiments to test the falsifiability of established hypotheses.
• Over 10 years: To bring about practical implications to real, tangible, breakthroughs to disrupt health and/or education. Furthermore, to put into practice those ideas in real working environments.