Monitoring daily emotions

hi all,

I’ve been tracking my physical characteristics (BMI, Body Fat, etc…) for a while now and developed a pretty good Excel spreadsheet with a large variety of metrics based on a few, easy-to-get values (i.e. height, weight, waist, etc…).

I’ve been thinking about expanding the idea to track and monitor psychological aspects of daily life, namely emotions. There are numerous benefits:

  1. If we can monitor sadness daily/ weekly we might, just might, identify the onset of depression(?)
  2. If we monitor how often we feel a craving for something we can track the strength of an addiction and how close we are to overcoming it
  3. If we experience something terrible and then monitor our daily emotions over time, we can see how long (time) it takes to return to the same level of happiness prior to the event (essentially how long it takes to get over something)

My thinking, so far, is to develop a long list of most of the emotions we could feel and categorised them according to one of the “primary emotions” theories in psychology. I would then tick/ mark the emotions I felt during the day (gives me the range of emotions experienced).

Then, I would have to indicate how much of each emotion I felt during the day (to get intensity).
From there, I could create an Excel formula that added up the intensity of each emotion for each of the “core” emotion groups.

Has anyone else had a go at monitoring/ tracking daily emotions?

Hi, I suppose you can find something useful in my thread:
https://forum.quantifiedself.com/thread-11-of-life-mood-logged

Hi,

have you checked

Pretty cool!

I’ve been enjoying the use of “Moodprint” @ moodprint.com … It allows us to enter feelings throughout the day, and then it generalizes them to color coded moods and emotions.

You might like this QS talk too: http://quantifiedself.com/2014/08/paul-lafontaine-never-fight-wednesday/

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Speaking of – I’m the founder of Moodprint, and am happy to answer any questions you might have.

Sounds quite interesting Paul. My problem with mood tracking has been that I’m normally feeling a variety of things at once, so its very reductive to simply pick a single figure and I lose a lot of the information. However, when I’ve tried more fine grained approaches, the chore of answering so many questions - there was one where I had to fill in who I was with, Reporter I think, and that took ages so I stopped bothering.

I’m building a mood tracking app at the moment (Harmony mood tracker) - one of the experiments I tried was having the user tap to log a ‘ball’ of mood which would have velocity and colour to represent mood. Up to down was mood high to low. Left to right was energy low to high. So if you tapped at the top right a fast green ball would appear. Tap bottom left and a lethargic blue ball would arrive. So you’d end up with balls floating around that represented your mood, that could also be stored quantitatively if necessary.

However, fun as it was to make, it was impossible to use and not actually useful… I’d be interested to hear more about your ideas for representing mood.

Hi all,
Sorry I went off the radar for a while.
Thanks for your advice, I’ve signed up to moodprint.com to see how it works and the moodmetric device is pretty cool.
Thanks for the links to the other topics! I’m going to try that Tap Log android app as well. Tom, is your mood tracker app available on Android phones?

Since this post, I’ve realised that I might not need to ask the ‘intensity’ question. For example, feeling furious is more intense form of anger than frustrated. Ecstatic is more intense form of happiness than joy. Therefore, if an app knew which emotions are stronger than others, then when someone writes down the emotions they felt during the day they would, in effect, be giving the intensity of that core emotion.

Since there are 8 or so core emotion groups (joy, fear/worry, trust, surprise, sadness, boredom, disgust, anger, curiosity), a simple pie chart could be used to represent the ‘emotionality’ of the day or even a ‘balance sheet’. if the app could prompt someone to type in how they feel each hour with location tagging, over time, a person could see which locations are correlating with certain emotions.

I work for a company that uses wearables to track emotional changes to a variety of stimuli. Right now, we’re focusing on media research, but we’ve developed a number of metrics that can measure apathy, withdrawal, excitement, vigilance, affinity, and engagement. I think these would go a long way in understanding depression.

You should check out our work: www.synetiq.net/tester

https://www.uni-due.de/de/presse/meldung.php?id=9264

Emotion (more exacly: frustration, or anger (?) ) tracking by mouse movement.
Pls somebody develop a mood tracker app :spray: :smiley: