Have trouble reading the emotions of a friend, family, or coworker? Just make that person glue some “emotion stickers” on their face!

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Background:

It is not always easy to interpret the emotional state of another person. For example, a person might not realize that their coworker is extremely annoyed or unusually morse.

This can lead to misunderstandings and hard feelings that could have been avoided if it were somehow unambiguously obvious what a person’s emotional state is.

The Issue:

To remedy this, people may suggest: “perhaps there should be a training program that teaches people how to interpret subtle social cues?” But this has a few downsides.

For one thing, there is no “one size fits all” approach to interpreting emotions (Fig 1), so this is likely to be a lengthy training program.

This basically brings the exaggerated comic book “!?!” and “anime sweat drop“ conventions to real life (Figure 2).

Fig. 1: These three people have roughly neutral faces. Are any of them seething with rage, unconsolably sad, or just feeling generally stressed? Who knows!

Additionally, it puts all the responsibility on the person interpreting the emotions, but that person might not even be especially motivated to learn this skill. (Imagine if you were told you needed to take a mandatory 12-week course to learn how to identify whether or not an indoor plant needs watering).

Proposal:

The solution is simple: emotion stickers that a person can (optionally) place on their face to indicate their emotions.

Fig. 2: In order to make it extremely obvious that a person is sad/joyous/enraged/etc., a person can put the appropriate sticker on their face, as shown here. In this example, A is sad, B is happy, and C is extremely stressed out.

These stickers (Fig 3) could be sold at every convenience store, thus providing a new economic opportunity for additional mostly-pointless consumption!

Fig. 3: Some “emotion sticker” ideas. Leftmost: extremely sad. Middle: feeling adrift, full of ennui. Right: coiled with rage, ready to snap at any moment!

PROS: Removes many causes of misunderstanding from social interaction. Plus, who doesn’t like stickers (!?).

CONS: People might become dependent on these stickers and unable to recognize emotions in non-sticker-festooned individuals. It might also be difficult to update the stickers in real-time as one’s emotional state changed: stickers could become “desynched” with reality.