What is the phenomenon?

The phenomenon I’ve chosen to focus on is the relationship between a person’s emotions and their confidence/self-esteem.

Why is it meaningful to you?

Personally, I spend a great deal of time thinking about my thoughts and the way I feel or react to situations in hopes that I’ll be able to understand their source and then change my behavior to promote positive emotions. Through this process, I’ve come to notice that self-esteem and confidence are big indicators of how happy I feel. It would be interesting to see how my emotions change based on my perceived confidence and vice-versa.

What do you want to communicate or express with your outcome?

By charting emotion and confidence over a given period, I hope to show a correlation between generally positive emotions and a higher level of self-esteem. Also, see how likely it is that a person might succumb to feelings of stress, anger or desperation when self-confidence ratings are lower. Additionally, I hope to make it possible for people to see themselves through a concrete medium. I feel that this could help people better understand their own emotions and thoughts.

How do your key information design choices address your goals?

By having emotion represented as a combination of shapes and colors, I hope to illustrate the complexity of the human condition. I tend to think of emotion as a melting pot in the sense that at any given time a person might feel angry but also a bit scared, confused, jealous or just apathetic. Additionally, having these emotions charted directly over time and higher or lower on the graph to indicated confidence at a given point show the correlation between the two variables in an easy-to-understand form.

Data Representation 

The data streams used to produce the information displayed on the graph are split into two categories:

Emotional data:

Emotions are easily interpreted through the physiological effects they have on those experiencing them. For this reason, the color, intensity and “shape” of the emotion graphics will be based on data collected about blood pressure, heart rate, eye liquid composition, tear crystallization, hormone levels and the kind of neurotransmitters present in the brain.

The data will be translated using special algorithms into a category of emotions ranging from anger, grief, anxiety and frustration to happiness, excitement, anticipation and even love.

The emotions will be averaged over regular intervals through the period to create an organic transition. Different hues and saturations will be assigned to each category of emotion and will be used to create a visualization of the person’s aggregate mood.

Self-esteem / Confidence data:

Given that confidence is a more complex phenomenon, we’ll have subjects rate their confidence on a spectrum at regular intervals throughout the charted period.

This data will be charted by having the emotion continuum flow up or down on the graph to illustrate fluctuations in self-esteem over time.