Emotions are more to do with your wellbeing, rather than your health, right? Surely, you can’t scientifically quantify emotional health? Well, according to researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, you can. The team have worked out how to read your mind and determine your emotional wellness – whether you’re sad, angry or happy – all by looking at a brain scan. The results of this study may be able to improve diagnoses of mental health disorders, and open a window into the minds of people with developmental disorders such as autism.
Study leader Karim Kassam, assistant professor of social and decision sciences at CMU, commented, ‘This research introduces a new method with potential to identify emotions without relying on people’s ability to self-report. It could be used to assess an individual’s emotional response to almost any kind of stimulus, for example, a flag, a brand name or a political candidate.’ Psychology professor Marcel Just, who helped oversee the study, clarified, ‘What emotion do you want to evoke with your ad for the latest BMW?’
For the study, ten acting students were asked to induce nine emotional states – anger, disgust, envy, fear, happiness, lust, pride, sadness, and shame – in whatever way he or she wished. Then, a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner took real-time images of their brain activation while they were shown words to bring them into each mood six times. The researchers used their computer programme to guess which emotion was bring conjured up, based on the brain scans.
According to Just, ‘We said, okay, here are five times when this person experienced sadness. Then we showed it the sixth instance, and asked, which one it was. It could identify the emotion with something like 84% accuracy on average.’ He added that although the experiment involved 10 different participants, the brain activation patterns were similar. ‘You can really tell which emotion one of these people is experiencing from their brain activation patterns,’ Just said. ‘You have no idea how I experience happiness. You imagine it must be similar, but there has been no way to compare it, until now.’
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