#emotionanalytics

A few years ago I read a book called Blink by Malcolm Gladwell and what fascinated me the most there was an article about Dr. Gottman's marriage lab. Married couples would come in and answer a few questions for about an hour and based on how they interacted with each other (but not what they said!) Dr. Gottman was able to predict accurately whether the couple would split up over the next 5 years.

How did he do it? He would condense the whole hour of conversation to a few seconds where certain intonation was prominent and it was possible to detect a particular emotion. The emotion most predictive of divorce was contempt. This was my early introduction to emotion analytics.

For the past 10 years I have been fascinated with the NLP (neuro-linguistic programming). In a nutshell, NLP is a behavioral technology focused on the connection between mind (neuro) and language (linguistic) and how their dynamics affect our behavior. NLP is focused mainly on the content of speech and the body language. This is possibly due to a limited ability of human beings to decipher verbal cues like intonation as opposed to visual cues like body language. Dogs and small children are particularly good at this, and that could be due to their inability to fully comprehend spoken language or express themselves verbally. Why do we lose this ability to a great extent when we enter adulthood? Why is there an evident lack of self-awareness that prevents so many people to succeed in professional and personal lives?

NLP is used for personal development and psychotherapy. Imagine if NLP were armed with a tool to analyze one's emotions and then work on better expression skills? On the other hand, when using NLP to build relationships, an addition of emotion analytics, and possibly even emotion anchoring and mirroring could be a powerful tool in communication.

NPL has an established framework, an algorithm, for skill development, or in other words converting something that one consciously makes an effort to do into second nature. As witnessed by Dr. Gottman, verbal interactions can create a strain on an emotional and a subconscious level; he saw something in the couples' interaction that would indicate an imminent divorce while the couples seemed perfectly happy with one another and did not suspect the problems that would arise down the road. If only we had a tool that could tell us what to work on with regards to our projection to the outside world? How many marriages would be saved if a technology similar to Dr. Gottman's was available to couples? Or even prior to taking their nuptial vows, could people spend some time analyzing their emotional compatibility using an algorithm rather than consulting their horoscope for that?