Emotions Manager 2000

Citation

Adamatzky, A. (2001), "Emotions Manager 2000", Kybernetes, Vol. 30 No. 9/10. https://doi.org/10.1108/k.2001.06730iad.001

Emotions Manager 2000

Quate Publishing CorporationMonroe, New York, NY

Keywords: Cybernetics, Data collection, Counselling, ComputersAbstract: We give a brief of account of theoretical background together with our personal experience in an emotion governing software – Emotions Manager 2000. Operational capabilities of the program are analysed. Advantages and drawbacks are discussed.

How to gain control over one's mind? Through the control of beliefs, desires and emotions.

While beliefs and desires could be easily tuned using common sense and reflexivity the emotions somehow avoid pressure of any straightforward non-drug-based manipulations. This is not surprising because we still lack widely agreed definitions of emotional states as well as well formed theory of affective behaviour. Even more "a partial loss of control over one's own thought processes" is often considered as a main feature of an emotional state (Sloman, 1992). In a light of recent results on involvement of emotions in human decision making (Goleman, 1994; Picard, 1997) it becomes more and more clear that simply combinatorial properties of one's brain, capacity of his/her memory or association-building abilities are not key factors of the person's intelligence. The intelligence is rather determined by varieties and complex dynamic of emotional states.

The emotional intelligence is based on empathy. The empathy is shaped during introspection. In the paper we discuss simple software – Emotions Manager 2000 – which employs classical techniques of introspection in order to govern one's emotions.

Ideology

Theorists argue that emotions may rely upon psychological processes, introspective behaviour, subconscious phenomena, combinations and interactions of basic emotions and cognitive processes (Lyons, 1980; Weiner, 1986; Green, 1992; Lazarus, 1991; LeDoux, 1996). Emotions Manager 2000 exploited a quite rational approach to emotions as event- and goal-driven processes. The emotions are considered as mental states produced by motivators and involving production of new motivators (Sloman, 1987, 1992). Few examples of goal determined emotional descriptions are shown below (Padgham and Taylor, 1997; Marchant, 1999):

• •

  Gladness/happiness: goal is achieved.

• •

  Disappointment: goal is not achieved and further action is useless.

• •

  Sadness: goal state is lost.

• •

  Relief: threat is disappeared.

How it works?

The software features an unsophisticated but straightforward and intuitive interface. As soon as the main screen is unfolded you are faced with an option menu (Figure 1). The option Resolve invites you actually to input your emotional state together with associated events:

1. 1.

   I am feeling?

2. 2.

   Involving the following area of my life.

3. 3.

   Describe the events of thoughts you had just before experiencing the emotion.

4. 4.

   Describe some positive things about this event.

5. 5.

   If you fears came true, what is the worst thing that could happen?

6. 6.

   If the worst thing did happen, what steps could you take?

Figure 1 Main screen of Emotions Manager 2000

The first question prompted you to choose one of the seven moods: either you are happy or sad or angry or anxious or hurt or feel disappointment or shame. It is difficult to say how good and realistic the list of choices is. It is not comprehensive however the list roughly matches a basic set of emotions, or primary emotions, adopted by academic community (Anderson, 1993; Anderson and Lebiere, 1998; Lewis, 1993).

Replying to the second question you could also choose one of the following: diet, exercise, general health, hygiene, children, spouse, parents, siblings, spiritual, leisure, career, work, boy or girlfriend, finances, bad habits, new habits, goals, virtue and character. Often it is extremely difficult to localise a cause of an emotion or a chain of events leading to the emotional feeling. Hopefully you are given a choice to click on other.

Answers to the third, fourth, fifth and sixth questions are not restricted to any particular templates. You just type in any text or even nonsense because the program gratefully accepts any rubbish at this stage. At this stage the program searches your previous records and displays "some examples of positive things you've said before". The question fifth and sixth are asked even if you have chosen happy when replying to the first question. This is a great set-back for the program showing that little care has been taken to make structure of questions logical.

The Resolve operation is designed to solve one's affective problems in several ways. If you emotions are irrational they will be rationalised. Unpleasant thoughts underpinning bothersome emotions will be eased. With the help of the Resolve operation the Emotions Manager compiles a database of your emotional reactions. This database is utilised to show basic trends of your emotions. It also helps you to resolve your emotional problems "by analogy", i.e. referring you to similar situations in a past.

When you start analysis you obtain a summary of your feelings gathered during a selected period of time. The temporal sequence of feelings could be also represented in a graphical form. You can view a flow of your emotions and classify them depending on the event's arena.

How good is it?

I did not find Emotions Manager particularly useful, neither did some other persons asked to test it. Disappointment is rather a common reaction. I am not saying that this software is bad, not at all. It is rather oriented toward less educated people or those who possess a low degree of emotional intelligence. If you are sound enough to recognise your emotions and to feel the emotions of others, then you are certainly able to understand reasons for your emotional storms and to make backward and forward analysis of your behaviour. Moreover, all advantages of using the software may be possibly seen only after months and months of Emotions Manager assisted exploration of one's affective world. As clinical psychologist Holmes correctly mentions: "In order to benefit you will have to diligently enter information about your own feelings every day for several months" (Holmes, 1999). Moreover, Emotions Manager undoubtedly helps if you are "a detail-oriented person – someone with obsessive-compulsive tendencies" and "committed enough to enter the data on a regular basis" (Holmes, 1999). Actually, the software combines an electronic diary with a very simple database, which allows you to observe trends in your mood and select events critical to transitions from one emotion to another. This certainly can cure some users but not all of them.

How to improve the program?

Using the ironic lexicon of estate agents we can say that Emotions Manager is a program with a "huge potential". Almost every operational unit of the software can be sufficiently improved. Unfortunately, in its present form the program lacks prediction abilities. The program shows past trends but does not say what you should expect in a future. A couple of simple statistical add-ons, a curve fitting technique and, possibly, a primitive simulation engine would enormously increase academic value, research calibre and clinical importance of the Emotions Manager.

Distribution

Emotions Manager 2000 is distributed by Quate Publishing Corporation (USA) which can be reached via its Web site http://www.quate.com/ by post on Quate Publishing Corporation, PO Box 2007, Monroe, New York, NY 10950. Tel: (914) 782-0959. The software is reasonably priced at around $40 which is "much less than the cost of a single therapy session" (Holmes, 1999).

Andrew AdamatzkyIntelligent Autonomous Systems LabUniversity of the West of EnglandAndrew.Adamatzky@uwe.ac.uk

References

Anderson, J. R. (1993), Rules of the Mind, Lawrence Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ.Anderson, J.R. and Lebiere, C. (1998), The Atomic Components of Thought, Lawrence Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ.Goleman, D. (1994), Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More than IQ, Bantam, New York, NY.Green, O.H. (1992), The Emotions: A Philosophical Theory, Kluwer, Dordrecht.Holmes, L. (1999), "Using you computer to manage your emotions", Mental Health Resources Guide, About.com, available at: http://mentalhealth.about.comLazarus, R.S. (1991), Emotion and Adaptation, Oxford University Press, New York, NY.LeDoux, J. (1996), The Emotional Brain, Simon and Schuster, New York, NY.Lewis, M. (1993), "Self-conscious emotions: embarrassment, pride, shame and guilt", in Lewis, M. and Haviland, J.M. (Eds), Handbook of Emotions, Guilford Press, New York, NY.Lyons, W. (1980), Emotion, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.Marchant, K. (1999), "A logic table of emotional functions", presented at International Workshop on Affect in Interactions Towards a New Generation of Interfaces, Siena, Italy, available at: http://gaiva.inesc.pt/i3ws/papers/IWAI99-KenningMarchant.zipPadgham, L. and Taylor, G. (1997), "A system for modelling agents having emotion and personality", Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 1209, pp. 59-71.Picard, R.W. (1997), Affective Computing, MIT Press, Boston, MA.Sloman, A. (1987), "Motives mechanisms emotions", Emotion and Cognition, Vol. 1, pp. 217-34.Sloman, A. (1992), Towards an Information Processing Theory of Emotions, The University of Birmingham, School of Computer Science, http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/cogaff/0-INDEX81-95.html#14Weiner, B. (1986), An Attributional Theory of Motivation and Emotion, Springer-Verlag, New York, NY.