Research in the past decade has been influenced by the “affective revolution in organizations” which argues that emotional processes are central to people’s decisions and behavior in any organization or community. The affective revolution has shifted organizations’ focus toward their employees’ well-being and mental state as a predictor of their performance. Architects of online communities realize that emotions are the strongest forecaster of engagement and are spending countless resources to increase digital emotionality. Also, there is an abundance of advanced technology products designed to track sentiments or help people change their feelings to achieve a variety of goals. We are now able to track people’s moods via text, voice, and behavior, and are able to design computational systems that respond to these sentiments.
The Digital Emotions Lab is located at the heart of these exciting developments with the hope of utilizing technology to understand, predict, and change emotions. Our first focus is on mood detection and prediction, both at the individual and the collective level. Our second focus is on emotional change, to identify when emotions are unhealthy or unhelpful in achieving certain goals. We utilize insights from psychology, management, and computer science to answer questions in these domains.
Faculty
Digital Emotions Lab is led by:
- Amit Goldenberg
Amit Goldenberg
, Assistant Professor of Business Administration. Holds a PhD in Psychology from Stanford University.
Activities/Research Focus
The approach of the Lab will combine experiments, computational modeling, deep learning, and analysis of large-scale digital data. It will seek to answer questions such as:
- How can individual emotions be evaluated?
- Is it possible to predict the occurrence of strong emotional responses, both at the individual and organizational level?
- How can technology be used to help people and collectives change their emotions when they are unhelpful?