Feel or perspective?

Should fish feel pain ? A plant perspective

Key (2016) claims fish that fish do not feel pain because they lack the necessary neuronal architecture: their responses to noxious stimuli, according to Key, are executed automatically without any feelings. However, as pointed out by many of his commentators, this conclusion is not convincing. Plants might provide some clues. Plants are not usually thought to be very active behaviorally, but t...

Could fish feel pain? A wider perspective

Key’s (2016) target article provides some strong arguments but also makes some logical mistakes. The arguments are not sufficient to support a definite conclusion that fish cannot feel pain. A multi-faceted perspective taking into account brain structure, chemical secretion in brain, animal behavior, and evolutionary biology may be useful and appears, at least in some aspects, to suggest the op...

To feel or not to feel: The role of affect in human-computer interaction

The past decade has witnessed an unprecedented growth in user interface and human– computer interaction (HCI) technologies and methods. The synergy of technological and methodological progress on the one hand, and changing user expectations on the other, are contributing to a redefinition of the requirements for effective and desirable human–computer interaction. A key component of these emergi...

Allergy shots: do patients feel pain or fear?

FEEL Thesis

If we are to learn the effects of the environment and our day-to-day actions, and choices on our physiology, we must develop systems that will label biophysiological senor data with contextual information. In this thesis I first present an architecture and implementation of FEEL: a system for the acquisition, processing and visualization of biophysiological signals and contextual information. T...