Final project: Empathemes

Download here: Empathemes (unpacked)

My final project is Empathemes, a Chrome extension which changes the color scheme of the current web page based on the most prominent emotion detected in the textual content. My goal was to subliminally induce a higher level of empathy with any content a user views, without any extra action needed to be taken by the user.

I took interpretations of colors and their meanings and combined them with word counting and scoring techniques to produce a short script that calculates the most significant emotion.  The emotions currently available are Love, Fear, Grief, Anger, Anxiety, Surprise, and Trust.

I created lexicons for each of this emotions.  Each lexicon has three levels of significance, and a word in each level will score either 3, 2, or 1 point(s) on a "hit", depending on the priority given to that level. This way, the algorithm more accurately assesses vaguely emotional content. This is the current lexicon for Anger. The words in the first array are weighted more heavily than those in the third array because they are stronger.

anger[0] = ["anger","angry","fury","acrimon","affront","belligerent","bitter","enrag","fuming","furious","heated","incensed","infuriat","intens","outrage","provok","provoc","seeth","storming","truculen","venge","vindictive"];

anger[1] = ["violen","outrage","hatred","enmity","aggravat","annoy","antagoni","crabby","cranky","exasperat","fuming","grouch","hostil","ill-tempered","indigna","irate","irritat","offend","resent","sore","spite","testy","ticked off"];

anger[2] = ["displeas","bugged","chagrin","dismay","galled","grim","impatien"," irk","petulan","sullen","uptight"];

After scoring, the page is styled only if the highest emotion score is 15% greater than any of the other emotion scores. This is to prevent styling for all-zero score cases, or cases in which there isn't a clear winner.

Here are some examples of pages styled according to the emotion of the content: