Implementation and Evaluation of a Responsive App Prototype for Identifying Emotions in the Body

The measurement of emotions is quite difficult and ranges from self-report measurements to neural measurements. Recently, the bodily sensation maps approach can be employed to study emotions related to phenomena that evoke different emotions in people. The emBODY tool (1) allows participants to draw where in the body they feel their emotions during different situations. It has been shown that those emotion-body patterns are universal across cultures and different stimuli (verbal vs. non-verbal) (2). To our knowledge, the embody tool runs only on a PC or via the Internet.

This thesis explores designing, implementing, and evaluating a responsive application prototype to psychological assessments of emotions in the body. The study aims to investigate potential differences between utilizing the mobile versus the computer version. This should provide insights into the advantages or disadvantages of adopting apps in psychological emotion research.

The goal is to create a functional and responsive app prototype capable of registering emotions throughout the day. This prototype will then be put to the test in a user study, where the feelings of the participants will be recorded in real time. The findings of the study will be meticulously analyzed to demonstrate the app's ability to accurately register feelings and its potential to identify specific emotional triggers in daily life.

• Conducting a literature review to ground the research
• Developing the prototype
• Conducting a user study with a prototype app (mobile and computer version)
• Evaluating the results

• Web development (e.g. React) or Android development
• Basic understanding of PHP and MATLAB for existing scripts

(1)  Nummenmaa, L., Glerean, E., Hari, R. & Hietanen, J. K. Bodily maps of emotions. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 111, 646–651 (2014).

(2)  Herman, A.M., Zaremba, D., Kossowski, B. et al. The utility of the emBODY tool as a novel method of studying complex phenomena-related emotions. Sci Rep 12, 19884 (2022).

More information about the embody tool: https://emotion.utu.fi/softwaredata/