rEboot

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  Emotional states collage

rEboot at a glance

What it does

Calibrating or resetting emotions. Reboot is a test of hypotheses where we assume that we can build a simple way to reset emotions.

We aim to reboot the emotional state with inconsistent emotional audio-visual pairs. We do this by showing a picture to the subject with one emotion e.g. happiness. Then we pair that with a voice e.g. an angry voice communicating a sentence that has a positive information value.

We combine each visual emotion with inconsistent auditive emotion. [Max 48 combinations.]

We want to determine if this has an impact on emotional state of people that have gone through the set of tests.

Reboot = Auditive emotion mismatching the visual emotional information aiming to reset emotional state. Regardless of the emotional state prior to the reboot.

rEboot metaphorically.

Reboot is like the conductor’s tuning fork. By resetting the emotions we can think of a group of singers, a choir. The conductor has his tuning fork. With the tuning fork he helps the group of singers to sing on the same level of voice. Reboot is a tool that helps to set the emotional tone.

We can think that reboot is like a tool to calibrate the emotions of one person for the emotion she wishes to have. Reboot helps to calibrate also the emotions of several people. To help people to be on the same page. To help people get the feeling they are in a same boat rowing in the same direction.

Resetting negative emotions. Sample stories:

Reboot helps people when fear and worries are spreading. Let’s imagine you work in a university. Maybe in Helsinki. All is calm in the workplace, you have built your career, your hopes, you have built your home savings on a stable job. Then comes a slap in the face: You see the news headlines.

Of course you had heard that it is bad time. And you had read the news that some companies have been firing their employees.

You think, that no, this is university. Not gonna happen. Not for me.

Then comes the shock. A news in the local newspaper saying: Major layoffs. Hundreds of millions euros need to be saved.

You see the headlines. And your feeling goes to fear. You feel the panic. And the fight or flight reaction kicks in. And you can not focus on your precious work anymore.

What if we had a way to help you? What if we can reboot your emotions? What if there was a way to reboot your emotions? Rebooting your emotions to help you. Rebooting your emotions so that you can easily focus again.

If you would get fired from your job, you would be able to focus faster on getting a new job. You would be able to find hope in those dark times. And you would faster be able to move forward in your life.

Or you would be able to get your projects done. Without the harmful worries. And that is very convincing for the management to consider you to stay in the community.

Negative emotions have a bad impact on you.

What if we can reboot those emotions? The fear or worries harm most of all you. And of course the fear and worries spread like wildfire throughout the organization. It is as if all got the same sickness of fearing for their jobs. And the most harm these feelings is to you. Of course it turns the productivity down in all the organization.

We are doing scientific work aiming for a groundbreaking discovery:

We have a hypothesis that the emotions we have can be rebooted using a set of inconsistent stimuli.

That means that we run a test where there is a mismatch in the emotions we hear and the emotions we see. And we aim to find if this mismatch can lead to resetting the emotional state.

How we built it

Rigorous science, loads of expertise, great teamwork, sweat, time, coffee and Ambronite. At Flux Helsinki :)

Challenges we ran into

Running a scientific experiment requires a lot of time.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

We got a team of strangers to work extremely well on the common goal. We set guidelines for a rigorous test of the hypothesis. We found out several possible uses for the concept.

What we learned

Emotional informatin conveyed auditively is actually quite hard to produce. We noticed that the emotional state of the subject affects on the interpretation of the spoken emotion considerably.

What's next for rEboot Why is reboot interesting?

Practical applications are plenty. If this hypotheses that emotions can be reset simply and safely proves to be working, the results can be used in many applications:

1. Police interrogating criminals. e.g. when policemen interrogate a criminal. In stead of playing good cop and bad cop, this could be used to reset the emotional state of the criminal and thus being more adaptive to release the truth.

2. Salesperson getting to better emotional state for to . Also this could be used in sales purposes, the salespersons would have better tools in understanding and possibly guiding the emotions that the potential buyer has.

3. Organizational fear can be driven out. The third use could be in a situation where major restructurings are at place. Like in a situation, where the universities got news that they need to save a boatload of money. And the people are shocked. And there is despair and even anger in the air. How might we help these people reset their own emotions so that they can direct their energy into more productive things for them and for the university.

4. Online psychology for milder disorders. Skype online psychology. Zero in get that ground zero.

5. Rebooting the cultural fit Recruitment is costly. And recruiting takes time. And cultural fit is also a fit into the emotional culture.

6. Focusing better. Pilot getting into focused mindset when landing a plane in a all night flight.

7. Refugees familiarizing more easily to the culture refugee cultural fit and finding ways to help us reboot our own feelings

8. Post traumatic stress disorder. PTSD cured. In PTSD people have a major disconnect to control their emotions. Reboot can help fix that.

9. A fix for Alexithymia. A big part of people in Finland have disconnect with their feelings. This is called alexithymia. Reboot can help resetting the emotions better.

10. Working with ideas within virtual teams involves allways emotions. For startups the advice usually is to keep the team at one place. For the team to see each other face to face. Partly this is because ideas always have emotions attached to them. Emotions and taacit knowledge. Hunches, intuition etc. And those are very hard to be conveyed online. Reboot can have a positive impact on virtual teams to help team members better understand other team members emotions, when the emotions are reset or recalibrated.

11. Happier families. For your family it has a tremendous help if we can help you reset and recalibrate the emotions within the family. A big part of communication is emotions. Helping to calibrate those emotions can have a big impact for a happy family life.

Built With

• microsoft-cognitive-services-api
• moodmetric
• moodmetric-sportstracker
• muse
• sportstracker