Feeling Something without Knowing Why: Measuring Emotions toward Archetypal Content

To enhance communication among users through technology, we propose a framework that communicates ‘pure experience.’ This framework can be achieved by providing emotionally charged communication. To initiate this undertaking, we propose to explore materials for communicating human emotions. Research on emotion mainly focuses on emotions that are relevant to utilitarian concerns. Besides the commonly-known emotions like joy and fear, there are non-utilitarian emotions, such as aesthetic emotions, which are essential to our daily lives. Based on Jung’s theory of collective unconsciousness, we consider archetypal content as a new category of affective stimuli of non-utilitarian emotions. We collected pictures and sounds of the archetype of the self, and conducted an experiment with existing affective stimuli of utilitarian emotions. The results showed that archetypal content is potential to be a new category of affective content. It is promising to explore other affective content for further studies.