an interesting concept for therapy.
http://affect.media.mit.edu/projectpages/girls/HOME.html
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This project is a part of a long-term research plan for understanding
the role that digital technology can play in helping people reflect,
make meaning, and test assumptions they have about the world and the
values they possess. The system, G.I.R.L.S (Girls Involved in Real Life
Sharing), allows users to reflect actively upon the emotions related to
their situations through the construction of pictorial narratives. Users
of this new system were able to gain new knowledge and understanding
about themselves and others through the exploration of authentic and
personal experiences. The system employs a new technology called common
sense reasoning that enables it to infer affective content from the
users' stories and support emotional reflection.
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This is grounded in psychological theories as the FAQ explains.
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Each screen of the software is grounded in research related to
constructionism, personal reflection, and active listening. Below we
describe these features.
Organizing Thoughts Around Personal Narratives
The emotional importance of expressive writing has been shown by James
Pennebaker and colleagues (1986) who suggested that written emotional
disclosure has profound effects on both physical and psychological
health. Pennebaker asserts that writing about significant life events
provides an opportunity for reappraisal of thoughts related to an event.
Therefore, a person may gain an increased understanding of her emotional
reactions, which might result in reduced distress (Pennebaker & Beall
1986; Pennebaker 1995). The G.I.R.L.S system offers girls the Memory
Closet, a safe space where they can write about events in their lives.
This writing may be a first step toward organizing thoughts related to
an event. Additionally, the system is set up so that all drafts of a
users story are saved, much like a journal that can be reviewed later.
A Story to Think With - Character Selection and Pictorial Narrative Windows
The next features encountered in the systemthe character selection
window and narrative construction interfacemay help girls to organize
their thoughts further by focusing on the most important people, places,
and things in their story and constructing a pictorial narrative around
them. The pictorial narrative may serve as what constructionists call an
object to think with (Papert 1980) . By externalizing situations in
their lives through expressive narratives and further by creating a
pictorial narrative, girls might better internalize and organize
meaning. The character selection window places girls in the directors
seat and asks them to select the characters who will star in their
story. The system is designed with preset images of characters in order
to emphasize the process of constructing the story rather than
developing images of characters.
Once students have chosen the stars of their stories, they are given the
chance to storyboard their narrative in the narrative construction
interface. They can choose from a small selection of backgrounds, but
they also have the option to use a small paint program to create their
own scenes. The names of the characters chosen in the character
selection window appear in a list box. By selecting a name from the list
and then selecting an emotion face, girls can choose the expressions for
main characters in the story (excluding the character representing
themselves). The goal of this feature is to encourage students to think
about the emotions of the other characters in their stories and use that
reflection to select an expression.
A Story to Think With - Character Selection and Pictorial Narrative Windows
The next features encountered in the system, the character selection
window and narrative construction interface may help girls to organize
their thoughts further by focusing on the most important people, places,
and things in their story and constructing a pictorial narrative around
them. The pictorial narrative may serve as what constructionists call an
object to think with (Papert 1980) . By externalizing situations in
their lives through expressive narratives and further by creating a
pictorial narrative, girls might better internalize and organize
meaning. The character selection window places girls in the directors
seat and asks them to select the characters who will star in their
story. The system is designed with preset images of characters in order
to emphasize the process of constructing the story rather than
developing images of characters.
Once students have chosen the stars of their stories, they are given the
chance to storyboard their narrative in the narrative construction
interface. They can choose from a small selection of backgrounds, but
they also have the option to use a small paint program to create their
own scenes. The names of the characters chosen in the character
selection window appear in a list box. By selecting a name from the list
and then selecting an emotion face, girls can choose the expressions for
main characters in the story (excluding the character representing
themselves). The goal of this feature is to encourage students to think
about the emotions of the other characters in their stories and use that
reflection to select an expression.
ConceptNet: Setting the Stage for Personal Reflection
Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish (1980) , authors of How to Talk So Kids
Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk, point out that children often
know how to work through problems but do not since they are so
accustomed to adults doing it for them. The authors suggest an effective
technique of active listening to avoid this tendency: to understand what
the child is feeling, suggest a possibility for how the event may have
made her feel, and let her talk about the situation (Faber & Mazlish
1980). This technique can be repeated until the child is able to work
through her feelings. The G.I.R.L.S. Talk system attempts to use this
so-called active listening technique through an adapted version of a new
technology, ConceptNet, developed at the MIT Media Laboratory (Liu &
Singh 2004) . ConceptNet is a common sense knowledgebase consisting of
spatial, physical, temporal, and social aspects of everyday life. It
consists of a natural-language-processing toolkit supporting affective
textual reasoning tasks over documents (Liu & Singh 2004) . When you
give it examples of text, it attempts to label them from a selection of
eight different emotions that are appropriate to the text. An important
note is that the ability for the system to obtain a more correct
response depends on the language and grammar used.
For each scene, a girl can set up everything except for the character
representing her in the story. To manipulate this character, she must
submit the caption to ConceptNet for analysis. Once she does this, the
system will try to empathetically suggest emotions that relate to this
event.
At this juncture, the student can select from four buttons, which read,
Yeah thats how I felt, No, I didn't feel that way, Maybe a little of
both, or I don't know.
Continuing personal reflection
To further support this first reflection on her emotions, the student is
then taken to an emotional weighting screen. On this screen, the student
can choose from the nine core emotions as well as have the option to
choose her own emotion. The weighting can range from not at all to a
lot, and is ideally based on how much the student felt she experienced
the emotion. This reflection is important because this weighting
determines how the main character (representing the student) will appear
in the main narrative construction screen once the user presses, Done.
For example, if the girl weights happy as a lot, the character will
appear with a big smile. Each emotion and weighting is associated with a
particular expressive appearance.
Sharing Reflection
Here, girls can connect to yahoo messenger and receive feedback on the
prominent emotions represented in her texts as they are sent as well as
feedback on the same in texts that he or she receives. Adding this
dimension helps girls to share how they are feeling, not only to a
computer, but to another girl working on a project.
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