Where is Emotion? Comparing Emotion Mapping Technologies

Understanding how experiences unfold requires measuring participants' emotions, especially as they move from location to location. Measuring and mapping emotions over space is technically challenging, however. While a number of technologies to record and spatially resolve emotion data exist, they have not been systematically compared. We present emotion data collected at a natural and military heritage site in the Netherlands using three different methods, namely retrospective self report, experience reconstruction, and physiology. These data are applied to three corresponding mapping methods. The resulting maps lead to divergent findings, demonstrating that spatial mapping of emotion data accentuates differences between distinct dimensions of emotions.