Crowdsourcing Collective Emotional Intelligence
This addresses the problem of emotional regulation for individuals under stress, offering a novel assistive approach, though it is incremental in applying existing crowdsourcing methods to a new domain.
The paper tackles the difficulty of applying cognitive reappraisal for emotion regulation by proposing an assistive technology that uses crowdsourcing to generate empathetic reappraisals on demand, demonstrating feasibility through two experiments with platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk.
One of the hallmarks of emotional intelligence is the ability to regulate emotions. Research suggests that cognitive reappraisal - a technique that involves reinterpreting the meaning of a thought or situation - can down-regulate negative emotions, without incurring significant psychological or physiological costs. Habitual use of this strategy is also linked to many key indices of physical and emotional health. Unfortunately, this technique is not always easy to apply. Thinking flexibly about stressful thoughts and situations requires creativity and poise, faculties that often elude us when we need them the most. In this paper, we propose an assistive technology that coordinates collective intelligence on demand, to help individuals reappraise stressful thoughts and situations. In two experiments, we assess key features of our design and we demonstrate the feasibility of crowdsourcing empathetic reappraisals with on demand workforces, such as Amazon's Mechanical Turk.