The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.
Muriel Rukeyser
January 31, 2023
At Empathic Technologies, we created products that shifted people's physiological arousal levels to bring them to a calmer, more balanced state. We validated the effect in the lab, and we tested with hundreds of people in real life, people with serious issues like PTSD or severe anxiety. We went through the same process with ADHD.
The promise of such emotion tech is huge. Can we really have technologies that provide relief in such straightforward ways, almost like an emotion dial on your wrist? No, not yet. Not because of limitations in the product. That did what it is supposed to do. The massive issues are elsewhere: in the way we test emotions in the lab, and in the narratives about emotions and interventions in the culture.
Western scientists have created an artifact: in our efforts to study emotions in an elemental way, we have created an experimental method that has strong but hidden context effects. Having study participants judge disembodied faces by choosing from a small selection of emotion words produces a psychological model that is intellectually pleasing, and true in context, but it has little to do with reality, because the context does not actually happen in real life. It will not be possible to understand the brain basis of emotion perception in any ecologically valid way by presenting posed, stereotyped faces in isolation. Future research should move beyond [such] studies to emotions in real-time, contextualized. Context in all of its various forms should be explicitly modeled.
Feldman Barret et al, Context in Emotion Perception
WEIRD runs on de-contextualization, leading to its particular ways of thinking, feeling, perceiving and moralizing. Lab experiments are the ultimate de-contextualization. Lab-based experiments have many strengths but not in this case and it is no guide to creating emotion tech. You cannot take something so disembodied and bring it back to real life.
Emotions are the complex conjunction of physiological arousal, perceptual mechanisms, and interpretive processes; they are thus situated at the threshold where the noncultural is encoded in culture, where body cognition, and culture converge and merge.
Eva Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism
You simply cannot hand someone a device that changes their physiological state and expect a reliable, predictable, emotional shift. Even when the device can produce that, the person has to be on board with the experience, willing. Otherwise it is jarring and even disturbing.
If they are on board, and the whole experience works, a new can of worms opens up. The floodgates of questions: what does that mean? Is there something wrong with me? Do I fix it? What is wrong? Why? There are no good questions to these answers because our understanding of mental health has far too many problems already. It is based on the normal/diseased model of people which is simply untrue. Pathologizing is disempowering and increases the effort we must make to recover a sense of agency.
We called this the narrative problem. A serious effect that is completely missed in the lab. In the lab, the device is hermetically sealed from meaning, the participant has no reason to ask themselves if the effect means something about who they are.
Any good designer will encounter it in product testing because that works the opposite way than the lab: every effort is made to understand how the product works in real life. The designer has a different mandate than the scientist: design is normative, while science is descriptive. The designer strives to understand the user's experience in as much depth as possible, stepping into their shoes, trying to see life through their eyes, because they will be making choices about the kind of different life they will be offering them.
The problem for emotion technologies is that it is not enough to design products that shift someone's physiological state, you also have to design technologies to shift their narrative. That is a big task because of course the person is embedded in multiple layers of social technologies that carry the current narrative.
Despite of growing awareness in the scientific community, the context biases continue to exist simply due to practical constraints. Just as the research is limited to Western undergrads because they are much easier to recruit, data is limited to lab data because it is easier to gather than ecological data.
Technology breakthroughs are unforgiving. You get no points for a study in a top tier journal if people have trouble integrating the effective-in-the-lab solution into their lives. Isolating questions about emotions in the lab will continue to produce results that are irrelevant in real life and invalid under closer inspection. Basing technology on this methodology is highly likely to fail, except perhaps in some very narrow disease treatments. Similarly, this route for scientific validation may stump high-context solutions that are valuable for people in real life.
What we all need is contextual data and comparative studies. Emotion tech products naturally gather contextual ecological data which is exactly what the science needs. Products targeting different populations are effectively comparative field studies. The products are ideally positioned to collect the real-world, contextual data the scientists would love to have. Then the scientists would be far better able to guide new technology creation and validation. This is not new, we already know that google, facebook, and amazon have the best data. They keep it for themselves, with the scientists getting some crumbs to analyze much after the fact. The data ought to be public goods instead, to advance everyone's interests.
Ultimately, this is a new door we can open to a better designed future. "All" we need to do is open up the channels between the different segments of human activities so they are not isolated segments but a whole pie.