Emotional labour is a term which refers to the use of body and
facial expression to convey emotion. Most of us have worked with the general
public at some point in our lives and can relate to the drain that these forms
of employment can put on an individual, particularly in terms of emotion. The
embedded video here depicts a recent device which is attempting to address this
drain. Dr. Hirotaka Osawa has developed a set of glasses which enhance the emotional
response of the wearer: the glasses blink, change angle and prolong gaze
depending on the action of the person interacting with the wearer.
While the device itself is fascinating, it is the future of
this technology which is of major interest to the field of cognitive science. Dr.
Osawa hopes that this technology will lead to the development of similar
devices which mimic human smiles and ultimately to the development of whole
android faces. The interpretation of meaning from a face is largely dependent
upon gestural elements from the eye and mouth areas. Speech interpretation is typically
dependent on the sound content of speech but visual gestural elements are also
a major part of speech interpretation. In order to develop an emotional android
we need to get a better grasp on the gestural elements of speech perception.
The embodied approaches fully embrace the importance of all
the various elements involved in speech. A move in mainstream psychology towards
the embodied perspective would be of major interest in moving research, like
that of Dr. Osawa’s, towards a level of actualisation that is perhaps not
attainable when approached from the traditional psychological viewpoints. This
is just one aspect of research, both applied and theoretical, which would
benefit from a shift to the embodied approaches. This move has been on the cusp
of cognitive science arguably for a number of years. It is up to the
researchers of the present, and perhaps more so, the students of the future to push this forward.
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