Mediating individual affective experience through the emotional photo frame

Abstract

A photograph is considered a medium with emotional legibility and a means of expressing and exchanging emotional experience. This research presents the interactive emotional photo frame system focusing on mediating individual affective experience among close relationships. This emotional photo frame system dynamically controls the photograph based on a user's affective states and user-specified emotion reaction rules. It is designed for helping users recognize and experience the same emotions with others. The system consists of an emotion recognition system, an emotion share server and an emotional digital picture frame. The emotion recognition system analyzes photoplethysmography, skin temperature and galvanic skin response signals to recognize user's emotional states and transmits the results to the server in real-time. The server stores user emotional data with individual emotion reaction rules that define how the picture frame should affect the photo in response to individual affective states. The emotional picture frame renders personalized visual and aural elements on the photograph according to the feedback of emotions. This paper presents an empirical exploration of the effectiveness of this system. The results revealed that most participants were influenced by their partner's emotion presented in this system. There was a strong relation of emotion sharing between the partners.