A Consideration of Emotional Topology: Representing Psychological Transitions on a Two-Dimensional Map

Abstract

Qualitative verbal and text data such as narrations and descriptions can include additional information about a subject’s spiritual response or deep psyche than questionnaires as quantitative data. Therefore, in the previous studies, various analysis methods have been developed to clarify and visualize the subject’s mental state based on these data. The present study focuses on the sequential transitions of the visualization results from our previous study. The purpose of this study was to reveal and visualize the transition patterns of the subjects’ mental states by analyzing their utterances. The mental changes were expressed with trajectories in two-dimensional space in which the relationship between various emotions was represented with self-organizing maps (SOM) as analyzed in the previous study. The present study demonstrated the modal patterns of mental changes among the subject groups by clustering the subjects. These patterns were visualized on the two-dimensional space composed of psychological evaluation axes, thus the visualization results were interpreted in terms of psychology. It was concluded that the group’s tendencies in terms of mental changes can be comprehended by noting on the transition of the mental states.