Digital Emotions Research Project

Detecting emotion regulation

This extension is developed as a part of a research project at the University of Melbourne investigating how people regulate their emotions using digital devices (“Digital Emotion Regulation”). The research aims to analyse changes in users' emotions while they use the Chrome browser during their worktime. Our extension adds an iframe onto every page that the user visits and asks the user to register their current emotion on a visited webpage and to categorize the page they just visited as a page used for work/play/both. The emotions are registered by the user clicking within a clickable area called EmojiGrid. The EmojiGrid is a self-report tool consisting of a rectangular grid that is labelled with emojis representing human emotions. The facial expressions of the emoji labels define a two dimensional model, expressing levels of valence (x-axis) and arousal (y-axis) following standard emotion models. To report their emotion in the moment the grid pops up, users mark the location inside the grid that best represents their emotion. This Chrome extension relies completely on the user’s self-report of data: it does not attempt to automatically sense the user’s emotions, and does not photograph users- nor record any physiological data. Thus, the user is completely in charge of what is recorded. The domains of webpages visited by the users are hashed (using a one way encryption) which cannot be decrypted. Hence NONE of the user's personal information is recorded by this plugin.