Counting the Affects: Discoursing in Numbers - innovations in computer systems

Social Research, Summer, 2001 by Otniel E. Dror

In the 1940s, the "Emotion-Meter"--yet another device--was applied in film previews, where "audiences at sneak previews ... unconsciously subject themselves to tests ... to determine their reaction to emotional sequences in the film they are watching." Loren L. Ryder, head of Paramount Studio's sound department, was "developing a small electronic gadget to record the spectator's heartbeat and rate of breathing as scenes of love, violence and excitement unfold upon the screen." The instrument, this report noted, "will be placed under a certain number of seats" ("Emotion-Meter," 1946). During the 1920s and 1930s, William M. Marston (the future inventor of Wonder Woman), Christian Ruckmick, and Wendell S. Dysinger conducted similar studies inside the laboratory. They projected movie scenes and measured the emotional reactions of their experimental subjects (Dysinger and Ruckmick, 1933; Marston, 1929).

In the private sphere, emotion detectors "reveal[ed] a talent in preventing marriage smash-ups" ("Lie Detectors," n.d.) and were "being tested as an instrument to measure advertising appeal." A "Mrs. Reeder's" reaction, one newspaper reported, demonstrated that "routine ads failed to interest her to any great extent ... [but] a fur coat ad caused the greatest rise in blood pressure ... [and] an attractive shoe ad caused a pronounced change in her breathing" (Moyer, n.d.).

Mrs. Reeder's emotional reactions to these consumer goods were reprinted in the popular press. Similar graphs of emotional reactions were also recorded during weddings. As the press reported, the new devices recorded the mutual emotional flux of couples during their wedding vows. These affective recordings appeared in the press, with the Chicago Herald and Examiner reporting that, in one case, "a blood pressure chart is attached to the marriage certificate" as a record of affective authentication ("Marriage," 1932).

In the clinician's office, an "Ego-Meter," or a "Mechanical Freud" measured subtle changes that indicated unconscious emotions. The "Mechanical Freud" was produced by the General Electric Company. "By a new electrical method it counts heart beats to pick up clews [sic] to emotions, repressed impulses and hidden libidos." It was "based on scientific findings that in unrestricted conversation the heart reveals emotions not always appearing under ordinary, formal tests" (Anon., 2-a). In fact, every physician's office contained an emotion-detecting device--the blood pressure gauge--as one newspaper suggested (Anon., 2-b).

Inside the laboratory, the number empowered the experimenter to produce emotions despite the laboratory's representation as an emotion-free space. The numeric representation of emotion presented one solution for the paradox of a laboratory that depended on the production of corruptive emotions.

Even the men of the laboratory did not disdain measuring, displaying, and communicating their own emotions in the pages of the published scientific literature--in the form of numbers or graphs. The late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century psychological and physiological literature contains numerous representations of the emotions of the experimenters themselves in this alternative mode of self-expression.