/dev/psychology » Psychology

Can you detect user emotion with only mouse movements?

admin — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 21:06:41 +0000

Trying to learn more about how emotion affects ecommerce, I came across the book “eMotion: Estimation of User’s Emotional State by Mouse Motions” by Wolfgang Maehr. Basically, Wolfgang Maehr found that you can correlate certain types of mouse movements with emotional states. Specifically, he found that mouse acceleration, deceleration, speed and uniformity could predict arousal, disgust/delight, and anger/contendedness, all in a sample of 39 participants.

But… how is this not available to me in a handy javascript library? I am just dreaming of reading off the emotional state of website visitors per page. Or per blog post for that matter…

If you know of anyone who has made any implementation of something like this, please please leave a comment!

Full research paper with numbers here: eMotion: Estimation of the User’s Emotional State by Mouse Motions.

Useful lists of cognitive biases

admin — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 15:35:15 +0000

I just want to share these very cool lists of cognitive biases. It’s so useful to just have an overview of these on hand – and obviously I’m not the only one thinking so, as there are several useful collections out there:

50 Scientifically proven ways to be persuasive
A Visual Study Guide To Cognitive Biases – They’re beautiful.
Stephen Anderson’s Mental Notes cards: Get Mental Notes: It’s printed and in a leather box!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases – The plain overview
UPDATE: The Psychologist View of UX Design. A less comprehensive, but still useful, list, by Susan Weinschenk

For the uninitiated, cognitive biases are identified tendencies in human decision making, or as wikipedia defines it “a pattern of deviation in judgment that occurs in particular situation”.

Psychology talk from YAPC::NA 2010 online

admin — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 11:40:42 +0000

The video recording of my talk from YAPC::NA on the Psychology of Perl is online. It has a very funny beginning when Tatsuhiko Miyagawa walks into the room receiving standing ovations as I start my talk, which is really weird in the video. Still made for a fun start of the talk…

I have to admit I haven’t watched the whole video myself, but word around is that people liked it. Which is motivating for putting together a larger, more detailed talk for a smaller interested audience, rather than a quick overview for a generally less-than-interested audience.

Ending The Long Quiet

admin — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 20:49:48 +0000

It turns out I’ve done to my blog what I swore not to: Stop updating it. However, I’ve also sworn that if I did I would come back to it and not give up.

So what happened?

Well, it’s been quiet here because the heat turned up a few notches in my day job, and the opportunities to actually apply psychological methods turned plentiful. I’ve been involved heavily in recruitment in a (the) major Perl employer these days, and while I’ve learnt plenty about the minds of computer programmers, I also find myself in the situation where there’s correspondingly little I can write about it. On one side because there’s limits to how much detail I can write about before giving out information best kept confidental, and on the other side because some parts of a recruitment process needs to be kept inside the company to not give candidates unfair advantages (or disadvantages).

Now in a related turn of events, I seem to be heading to the Nordic Perl Workshop 2010 and I’m thinking about putting together a talk introducing the idea of using methods from Psychology to Perl programming. Alternatively just a general light-weight something about some subject from the world of Psychology of Programming. Which leads me to, if anyone who’s been reading the blog still follows it, what was your favourite post? Or what post would you like to seen elaborated on? Or what would just make a good talk?

Or to put it like the quintessential computer/psychology crossover, ELIZA, would: Come, come, elucidate your thoughts!