On the Acquisition of Human Emotions in Space and Time

Emotion assessments traditionally take place in academic or medical settings. The impact of environmental factors such as e.g. the characteristics of the place, the weather, or the time of day on the emotional state of inhabitants are often dismissed, thus emotions as a dynamic feature cannot be used for city planning or development. To estimate emotions as spatio-temporal data, a growing research community focused on emotion extraction from social network platforms such as Twitter or Facebook. The quality and the reliability of the resulting emotion evaluations are not comparable to direct emotion assessments, e.g. because of possible biases of emotional statements in social communities. In order to bridge this gap, we designed a web-based survey service that allows for the acquisition of geo-located emotion ratings of a huge group of participants in real-world environments, which in turn can be related to numerous environmental variables. In this paper, we present the architecture of this web-based service along with first results of a pilot study. In the end, we discuss possible use cases for spatio-temporal emotion data, the limitations of our web-based service, and present an outlook on possible future projects.