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Being able to classify experienced emotions by identifying distinct neural responses has tremendous value in both fundamental research (e.g. positive psychology, emotion regulation theory) and in applied settings (clinical, healthcare, commercial). We aimed to decode the neural representation of the experience of two discrete emotions: sadness and disgust, devoid of differences in valence and arousal. In a passive viewing paradigm, we showed emotion evoking images from the International Affective Picture System to participants while recording their EEG. We then selected a subset of those images that were distinct in evoking either sadness or disgust (20 for each), yet were indistinguishable on normative valence and arousal. Event-related potential analysis of 69 participants showed differential responses in the N1 and EPN components and a support-vector machine classifier was able to accurately classify (58%) whole-brain EEG patterns of sadness and disgust experiences. These results support and expand on earlier findings that discrete emotions do have differential neural responses that are not caused by differences in valence or arousal.
Sadness is now a design problem. The highs and lows of melancholy are coded into social media platforms. After all the clicking, browsing, swiping and liking, all we are left with is the flat and empty aftermath of time lost to the app. Sad by Design offers a critical analysis of the growing social media controversies such as fake news, toxic viral memes and online addiction. The failed search for a grand design has resulted in depoliticised internet studies unable to generate either radical critique or a search for alternatives. Geert Lovink calls for us to embrace the engineered intimacy of social media, messenger apps and selfies, because boredom is the first stage of overcoming ‘platform nihilism’. Then, after the haze, we can organise to disrupt the data extraction industries at their core.
We Are Not Sick is a hybrid lecture/music performance by Geert Lovink and John Longwalker. Combining a diversity of text-, image-, and music-genres, the project reflects on the encroaching sadness provoked by social media architectures.Through this project they push for new modalities in both music and critical theory, to shake up both the dance floor and the lecture circuit. Utilizing a range of electronic musical genres for maximum reach, the Sad By Design album is not a soundtrack to a book of theory but rather a new attempt at expressing those same themes, using the same words but achieving different vectors of critique. Sad By Design is a ‘carrier wave for critical theory,’ crafted over two years of refining our answer to the question of what this new ‘critical music’ hybrid feels like to experience.
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