Emotional dynamics and quality of lived experience: a study of the usage of the Valence-Arousal space with the Spot Your Mood tool

The emotional dimension of someone's experience and its visualization is a increasingly recurring theme in scientific studies. If emotions are often studied using sensors measuring the activity of the body or the brain of an individual, few tools exist in a strictly qualitative usage (Geneva Emotion Wheel (Sacharin, Schlegel, Scherer 2012), Self-Assessment Manikin (Bradley, Lang 1994), Spot Your Mood (Yvart, Delestage, Leleu-Merviel 2016)). In terms of emotion visualization of participants, the usage of these setups requires them to have a clear and synchronized visualization with the experimental content to be pertinent. Based on 17 clinic cases using Spot Your Mood (SYM), a nonverbal tool for the declaration of emotional states based on the Valence-Arousal space (Russell 1979, Scherer 2005), this article explore the possibilities of the SYM tool regarding the visualization of the data it produces. The emotional data collected are notably confronted with semi-structured interviewes, as well as a second viewing of the videos in the original settings, directly commented by the participant. The resulting analysis of the emotions declared with SYM and the various verbalization methods allowed the emergence of satisfactory correlations to assess the liability of the participants’ spots (name given to the self-assessment in SYM). That way, the identification of zones on the Valence-Arousal space describing the quality of the relation between the content and the individual could be done, as well as the implied emotional pathways, allowed to represent the individual’s emotional dynamics. It opens the door to a better representation of the emotional experience in a qualitative setting for one or multiple persons in a statistical approach. This article will begin by presenting the different tools used to gather emotional data with a declarative approach. Afterwards, in the context of (Mugur-Schächter 2006) and (Varela, Thompson, Rosch 1993), alongside the experimental results observed in (Delestage 2018a), the communication will describe the possibilities of SYM in the determination of the emotional dynamics of an individual, and particularly, the validation of its results by describing the triangulation tools employed.

Charles-Alexandre Delestage, Willy Yvart. Emotional dynamics and quality of lived experience: a study of the usage of the Valence-Arousal space with the Spot Your Mood tool. Conferencia Métodos visuales y metodologías en las investigaciones sobre comunicación, Dec 2018, Tenerife, Spain. ⟨10.4185/cac144⟩ - lien externe. ⟨halshs-02010995⟩ - lien externe