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emotive objects: the objectification of our emotional selves: how objects act as brokers of our emotive experience

sekai maswoswe

This paper will exam the ways in which our material worlds collide with our emotional selves resulting in an objectification of our emotional selves. We will further look at how objects broker our emotional experience with material substances.

Objectification is the process of making something an object, the act of representing an abstraction as a physical thing, and/or the expression of private emotions in a public idiom. Emotion is the language of a persons mental state of being, any strong feeling, and/or incidents of coordinated changes in several areas, including what has been called the ‘reaction triad’ of physiological arousal, motor expression, and subjective feeling, in response to either an internal or an external event of significant importance to an individual.  

Objects act as brokers of our emotional experience in three important ways. Objects serve as physical boundaries, have an absorptive function and an expressive function.

As a physical boundary, objects frequently become agents of our emotional selves. For instance, guns are an adequate example of this notion. Gun’s don’t kill people, people kill people. Well, both people and guns kill. The erection of protective boundaries where people are likely to be angered is demonstrative of the merger between objects and emotions. Almost every towing company has a physical boundary separating the person picking up their car from the tow company employees because patrons are usually in a volatile emotional state. So, that object—that physical boundary, contributes significantly to maneuvering through that emotional exchange.

As abortive mediums, objects frequently absorb our emotional experiences. This is true quite literally and figuratively. Punching bags, calm balls, and stress balls are all ways that objects serve their absorptive function. In a figurative sense though, objects that are thrown in fits of anger, a pen that is chewed out of nervousness, pillows that are drenched with our tears or food that we consume in depression—these are all ways that our material world must absorb our interior world.

The expressive function that objects serve is observable in the way that artists construct their art, or the earplugs in our ears, or way we wear our clothes. If we observe our material world closely enough, we can see how demonstrations of our feelings can be seen in the objects around us.

The objectification of emotion is something that has long been considered by other important thinkers. “…The emotional appetitive elements in our conscious experience are those which most closely resemble the basic elements of all physical experience.” “Hume and Locke…assume that emotional feelings are necessarily derivative from sensations…The converse doctrine is nearer the truth: the more primitive mode of objectification is via emotional tone, and only in exceptional organisms does objectification, via sensation, supervene with any effectiveness.”

There are four primary examples of objectification of emotion that this paper will consider. Environment, art, mood rings and design comprise the four demonstration of such objectification. Environment is an object that affects our emotional selves, art is an object that is infused with our emotional self, mood rings materially represent our emotional self, and design comprises the object we consume because they are demonstrative of our emotional selves.

environment

There are three primary components of our environment that effect and contribute to the objectification of our emotional selves—color, light, and spatial orientation.

Color has long been known to affect mood and emotional experience. In addition to the cultural symbolism attached to colors across cultures and throughout time there is an added psychological and physiological response to the colors in our environment. It is said that tonal families relate to personality types. All shades, tones and tints can be classified into four tonal families. Thinkers like Jung have isolated four personality types by bodily fluids (Choleric, Melancholic, Sanguine or Phlegmatic). There is a tonal family associated with each personality type. The following colors are indications of the moods or demeanors that are provoked in the overwhelming presence of such colors.

• Blue: divinity, calm, shyness, coldness

• Red: excitement, love, valor, passion

• Orange: radiance, warmth, intimacy

• Violet: inspiration, self-esteem, dignity

Green: balance, harmony, ease

Light has also been long known to produce a certain psychological and emotional response. There is also an additional physiological response. Light is absorbed by the body through both the eyes and skin, affecting each of the body's physiological systems and reaching the pineal gland by way of a complex network of nerves. The pineal gland responds to these light levels, manufacturing melatonin in response to the approach of darkness. The following types of light are accompanied with the resultant emotional states:

• Fluorescent light: attentive, nervous, anxious

• Natural sunlight: calm, happy, balance

• Bright light: excited, aggressive, irritable

The relationship between light and emotional experiences is so pervasive that it can even result in a psychological condition. Seasonal affective disorder (SAD) is a form of depression that occurs during the winter season as a result of a lack of exposure to natural sunlight.

Spatial Orientation is a component of our environment which further objectifies, affects, and represents our emotional selves. The set up of our physical environment affects the emotional experience we will have in that space and perhaps carry with us when we leave that space. Some of the corresponding states follow:

• Elevation: authority, subordination, oppression, helplessness, empowerment

• Horizontal: helplessness, placidity, calm

• Clutter: anxious, overwhelmed, out of control, irritable, aggressive, stress

• Barren: calm, sad, boredom
Spatial orientation has such a deep affect on our emotional experience that there are ancient practices centered around such an idea. Feng Shui is the ancient Chinese practice of spatial arrangment in effort to achieve harmony and balance
art

Art can be said to be an objectification of our emotional selves because it is frequently infused with variants of our emotive experience. It is often used a mode of expression, and even the sole expression of various emotional experiences. It is a vehicle to bring those otherwise abstract sentiments in a real life way that is easier to acknowledge and connect to. According to Ayn Rand, … “Art serves a vital psychological need that is at once cognitive and emotional. Only through art, in her view, can man summon his values into full conscious focus, with the clarity and emotional immediacy of direct perception.” For Rand, then, art is a unique means of integrating the physical and psychological aspects of human existence. Rand, however, is not alone in her recognition of the closeness between emotion and art.

Art/Emotion Quotes:

Art is one of the sources through which the soul expresses itself and inspires others. But to express art thoroughly, one must have the inner emotions opened thoroughly. (Meher Baba)

All of our actions take their hue from the complexion of the heart, as landscapes their variety from light. (Francis Bacon)

Very few people have a natural feeling for painting, and so, of course, they naturally think that painting is an expression of the artist's mood. But it rarely is. Very often he may be in greatest despair and be painting his happiest paintings. (Francis Bacon)

All painting should be emotional painting. (Judi Betts)

The state of our heart at the moment of applying paint to canvas gets into the mix somehow. What our audience actually 'gets' when they regard our work is simply how we felt while we were doing it. (Eleanor Blair)

mood rings

Mood rings are objects which literally physically represent our emotional selves. We quite literally wear our hearts on our sleeve in this sense. A mood ring changes color in response to body temperature using a thermochromic liquid crystal indicating the temperament of the wearer. It was a popular fad in the 1970s and 90s eternalized in the movie My Girl.

Mood Ring Color: Emotion:

• Black: Tense, nervous, harassed, overworked

• Gray: Anxious, nervous, strained

• Amber: Nervous, emotions mixed, unsettled, cool

• Green: Average reading. Active, not stress ed

• Blue-green: Emotionally charged, somewhat relaxed

• Blue: Relaxed, at ease, calm

• Dark blue: Anger, tense

• Red: Love

• Victorian Red (Dark Red/Blood Red): Anger, Hatred

design

Design is the final way we objectify our emotional selves. The objects we contain/consume because they are demonstrative and extensions of our emotional selves and often inextricably linked to emotional experience. This notion has such strength that industries have begun to design and market products as emotional carriers, containers and generators. Several interesting papers on this matter are submitted annually at the Emotion and Design conference.

Products have reached such a state of functional perfection that the emotional component of objects has become increasingly important. Design and emotion relates not only to form but to many other properties related to the senses. How does the object smell and feel? What does it sound like?

What sort of emotions do we design for and with what products?

An example that is designed with large consideration of the objectification of our emotional selves is artificial intelligence products. Emotion has recently come to play a large role in human information processing. Computer designers have come to realize that the separation of cognition and emotion is a misunderstanding of the natural human process.  Thus, technology is now being designed as emotional machines. “Our... idea is that there is something called 'thinking' and that it is contaminated, modulated or affected by emotions... Emotions aren't separate" says Minsky, the author of Emotion Machine.

So, we have examined the four ways we objectify our emotional experience. Environment, art, mood rings and design comprise the four demonstration of such objectification. Environment is an object that affects our emotional selves, art is an object that is infused with our emotional self, mood rings materially represent our emotional self, and design comprises the object we consume because they are demonstrative of our emotional selves.

Why do we objectify our emotional selves? It is perhaps a natural response to an increasingly consumption based society, a safer way to objectify emotions than to embody them directly, less likely that you are violating tenets of social etiquette, it is a natural response to the emotive substance objects inherently represent (animism based) and is perhaps another trend in distancing and abstracting our emotional selves.
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