Investigation in Emotion Classification
This is the early stage research of the project. In late January, 2012, I emailed around Royal College of Art asking for words describing emotions in languages other than English that are untranslatable into English. Interesting enough, in order to understand the untranslatable words I had to have several correspondence with the person who contributed the word, and through this back-and-forth discussion can I actually get the glimpse of the emotion itself. These explanation of the untranslatable words are often in the format of “it is a kind of (emotion A), close to (emotion B), and somehow between (emotion C) and (emotion D).” This triggers me to map out the emotions based on the classification of emotions provided in Shaver et al. - “Emotion Knowledge - Futher Exploration of a Prototype Approach.” in the book Emotions in Social Psychology by W. Parrott (2001). Which I intented to visualised the untranslatable words as chemical molecules that reacts with the emotion “nodes” to the fact that untranslatable words are often complicated emotions that are the mixture of other translatable emotions.
Pictured above: New emotions invented by the Internet.
