Soma}News – Jan/Feb 2014

Hello! Today I’m kicking off a more newsy approach to the E}V blog reflecting ongoing interests in the overlaps between art/design, science, dataviz and the body. Your comments, shares or suggestions are warmly welcome. 

This Finnish research project about the body and self-reported emotions was the main interest in January. See my review here.

Dataviz – QS – Visual Research

• Selfie City investigates the style of self-portraits (selfies) in five cities across the world –  great research and interpretative tools. It’s the tech big brother of the subtly engaging project Portrait Prints Lifted From The Computer Screen: an artist’s response to selfies by creation of one-off photographs exposed from laptop screens.
• I’m currently testing Nicolas Felton’s Reporter App and liking the design interface.
• Just found this thesis on the boards of Quantified Self – The Quest for Happiness in Self-Tracking Mobile Technology which preceded the launch of Reporter App by a year. It gives a handy inventory of quantified self apps and happiness measurement scales in the appendices.
• A new study shows how useful it can be to provide questionnaires to patients in waiting rooms. Different rates of depression and anxiety were found across hospital departments. “This makes effective use of waiting room time, and provides useful, usable information in a format which is easy for non-mental health professionals to interpret and act upon,” the authors note.

Affect in the Bigger Picture

• Loneliness is a major health risk for older adults
• After committing a crime, guilt and shame predict re-offense
• Intuition, Emotion-Based Learning, & the Iowa Gambling Task
• The pedagogy of disgust: the ethical moral and political implications of using disgust in public health
• Understanding fear means correctly defining fear itself

Love

• Brain’s ‘sweet spot’ for love found in neurological patient
• What falling in love does to your heart and brain – Why loves makes us blind
• Exploration of interactions on facebook between couples before and after the relationship begins. 

Soma Nuggets

• ‘Smelling’ with our eyes: Descriptions affect odour perception
• Researchers want your body odour to be your new ID
• Feeling powerless ‘makes tasks more physically challenging’
• Under bright lights emotions are felt more intensely
• Blue light may fight fatigue around the clock

Handy

• Eyemusic sensory substitution device enables the blind to ‘see’ colors and shapes
• 3D-Printing Loom Envisions a wardrobe that can be produced at home
• Gaze-Tracker Lets People Drag Computer Files With Their Eyes
• Vizualising Health: scientifically vetted visualisation techniquesfor a variety of health information situations.
• Clueless about statistics but like watching dance?
• RAW: liking the potential of this accessible online data visualisation tool

Emotion Lexicon

Saudade, a word in Portuguese, “was once described as “the love that remains” after someone is gone. Saudade is the recollection of feelings, experiences, places or events that once brought excitement, pleasure, well-being, which now triggers the senses and makes one live again. It can be described as an emptiness, like someone (e.g., one’s children, parents, sibling, grandparents, friends, pets) or something (e.g., places, things one used to do in childhood, or other activities performed in the past) that should be there in a particular moment is missing, and the individual feels this absence. It brings sad and happy feelings all together, sadness for missing and happiness for having experienced the feeling.” (Wikipedia) 

Via: Infosthetics, psfk, Psychology Today, ScienceDaily, Stumbled Upon, Quantified Self, Wikipedia
#soma #somesthetics #dataviz #affect #research #emotion #quantifiedself #qs #love #language

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