Towards Universal Visualisation of Emotional States for Information Systems

The paper concerns affective information systems that represent and visualize human emotional states. The goal of the study was to find typical representations of discrete and dimensional emotion models in terms of color, size, speed, shape, and animation type. A total of 419 participants were asked about their preferences for emotion visualization. We found that color, speed, and size correlated with selected discrete emotion labels, while speed correlated with arousal in a dimensional model. This study is a first step towards defining a universal emotion representation for use in information systems.