The Emotional Perception Study
Ceative Systems Design & Visual Interaction Concept
Concept
We never look at the same image the same way.
A moving image is never neutral. Even without narrative context, viewers instantly decide how to feel - but those decisions are subconscious, biased, and unstable.
This project examines how humans reconstruct reality from incomplete information.
I built a small system to measure how people project emotion, memory, and personal narrative onto ambiguous visual scenes.
I interviewed 50 people showing them five selected scenes, based on the semantic differential, a research tool by psychologist Charles Osgood that measures how people position a stimulus between opposing meanings.
Participants were asked to locate it along paired emotional axes: tranquil vs. unsettling, familiar vs. bizarre, calming vs. frightening.
Key Learnings
1. Interpretation collapses when social context disappears.
2. Two types of surrealism emerged: affective and perceptual.
3. Stillness is more disturbing than movement.
5. People rated the narrative they imagined, not the image they saw.
This experiment shows that emotional perception can be mapped, compared, and made visible. Ambiguity doesn’t blur interpretation; it exposes the mechanics of how people construct meaning.
The system demonstrates a method for analyzing affect, narrative projection, and perceptual drift — a direction I aim to develop further across interface design, creative research, and computational storytelling.
© STUDIO THOMAS KUHN 2026