How do you feel? : Designing for Emotional Self-Awareness and Perceived Anonymity in an Audience Response System

Abstract: Humans’ emotions have the ability to take over, which might end up with responses inappropriate to the situation. The solution to inappropriate responses is to have a better awareness. Great team-work, calm employees, and rational decision making are all qualities that derive benefit from emotional self-awareness. However, studies show that only 36 percent can identify their emotions as they happen. This paper takes on the opportunity to raise emotional self-awareness by designing a prototype that enables the users to reflect and anonymously share their emotion through an audience response system. Forty-eight participants, in various group sizes, did within-subjects tests. They started by writing down their answer to the question: How do you feel?. They later answered through the prototype. Whether or not the participants managed to be more specific through the prototype was measured, as well as their perceived anonymity. The results revealed that the prototype was useful in both helping the users to learn emotion definitions and further specify their emotion. In regards to the perceived anonymity, it showed that the design was favoring a larger group size around 20 participants.