Affective Laboratory

In the new era when the concept of affectiveness have penetrated among managements, affectiveness will also be called into question as a qualification of a manager as a person; ability to deliberate possible emotional responses in other’s mind. It would also be true for individual in general. Affectiveness may also be one of the evaluation criteria at recruiting or personnel evaluations. In that era, it will be quite usual for people to think about their own affectiveness. That means, the idea of “to think about other’s affect” or “to behave with deliberating possible impacts on other’s emotion” are widely accepted as an important value system in the society. Such a society should be called as an affective society. Again, this idea is not really new. This can be a reflection on an old issue that Goleman (1995) warned more than a decade ago, but has been buried in the shadows of the trends of market fundamentalism and cost-reductionism and has not well reflected by people.

In an affective society, people will be required to grow out of the over-simplified codes of conduct such as they can do anything as long as it is not regulated by law or berated by others, or they should pay efforts for visible results objectively evaluated but not for elusive matters such as human minds. However, it goes without saying that such affective society is the society that is gentle to people, with much less stress, and comfortable and peaceful place to live.

Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ. New York, NY: Bantam Dell.

source: Umemuro, H. (2009). Affective technology, affective management, towards affective society. Proceedings of The 13th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI International 2009).