It is likely that you, a human, can tell when your fellow humans are upset based on the sound of their voice. You might even be able to tell when your non-human pet is upset. But what about non-mammals, like frogs? What about birds?
Facebook made another bad decision today, adding an unnecessary amount of nuance to your interactions on its social platform. You can now “sad” and “wow” not just posts and messages, but also comments. I don’t know about you, but I certainly don’t want this level of comprehensive feedback.
The field of psychology is currently in the midst of a kind of civil war, with one side claiming a widespread reproducibility crisis, and the other just as loudly proclaiming that concerns are greatly exaggerated.
Our modern environment is saturated with wireless signals, a consequence of our insatiable desire to transmit data seamlessly and efficiently. A new device developed by scientists at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) can use these ubiquitous signals to detect our inner emotional…
Ever wondered how your emotions interact or what they give rise to? This visualization, called The Atlas of Emotions, combines experimental psychology and insight from the Dalai Lama to try and explain.
When the first guests arrive at Nagasaki’s Hotel Henn Na in July this year, they will be greeted and served by robots. In a similar approach, Toshiba’s android Aiko recently held a short-term role greeting customers at a department store in Tokyo. Customers were comfortable approaching Aiko to ask for directions and…
German researchers have created a version of Nintendo's Super Mario Advance in which the videogame hero can learn and venture through the game according to his "feelings." It's an exciting advance, but the claim that Super Mario is now "self-aware" is grossly overstated.
Elena Rogova's Appearance and Reality is a clever short story that tackles something we can all relate to: the difference between the feelings we show to the world and our hidden true feelings. It's like as we grow up, we put on a mask to suppress our feelings to look cool or appear strong or whatever. Screw that.
You've heard the self-help gurus who say positive thoughts can bring us happiness, wealth, and success. But there's another side to the story. Here's why positive thinking often backfires — and why many of us are starting to resent it.
In today's experiments, one of the most common tricks that experimental psychologists play is giving people placebos instead of drugs. In the past, it was pretty much the reverse. Doctors would call people in, tell them they'd get an innocuous substance, and then inject them with something a thousand times more…
Over the weekend, the internet exploded over the fact that Facebook had conducted psychological experiments on user news feeds. While Zuckerberg's team doesn't see a problem with that it did, academic researchers seem think it breached ethical research guidelines.
Spend time with a Debbie Downer, and you'll likely end up feeling blue. Turns out, the same is true digitally: Facebook's new study says this "emotional contagion" works just as strongly through your News Feed—which they discovered after tinkering with the emotional content of nearly 700,000 random users' feeds.
Like anyone, I suppose, I take great pains to avoid humiliation. But as a fat person, humiliation is built into my everyday existence—just living in my body is coded as humiliating by the culture at large—so when I was younger, I always went out of my way to be more in control of my image than I needed to be. More…
Our technologies are rapidly evolving, and with it, the very nature of our personal lives. Here's how the era of tech-enabled intimacy will forever change the way we go about forming and maintaining relationships.
Coming across as a socially functioning human who expresses real emotions can be such a drain. If only there was a high-tech way to replace your flat, expressionless gaze with a digital approximation of human warmth. Well, search no more. AgencyGlass is here.
In a study that now seems embarrassingly overdue, scientists have tripled the list of human facial expressions from six to 21 — adding such emotions as "sadly surprised" and "happily disgusted."
Passengers in a car can help calm an angry driver when another vehicle cuts them off. But when a driver is alone, that anger can easily turn into road rage which puts everyone at risk. So researchers at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne—or EPFL for short—are working on an in-car facial recognition system that…
Watch Jackson, an awesome four-year-old kid, become overwhelmed by a beautifully sad song while riding in his Dad's car. He tries to fight off the tears but he can't help it. He starts crying because the music is so touching but he doesn't want to change the song. He can't. He takes off his glasses to feel the hurt…
Nerves make your stomach churn; embarrassment brings a glow to your cheeks. Emotions clearly have a direct physiological effect on our bodies, and now a team of Finnish researchers has analyzed exactly how—and represented them in this visualization.
Promising to revolutionize the amusement park funhouse as we know it, researchers at the University of Tokyo's Hirose-Tanikawa lab have created a remarkable mirror that does more than just make someone look overly thin or tall. It's actually able to change the emotion on someone's face, replacing a frown with a…
