Communication can stabilize people's emotions

Year: 
2019
Ranking: 
Entrant
Artist: 
Pedro Cisneros (Graduate Student)
Department: 
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Lab: 
Bullo Lab

Description

Evolution of interpersonal emotions in a group resulting from a sociological mathematical model. Although emotions can radically change in magnitude and shift around being positive, negative or even neutral during discussions...peace periods always comes to the people who are open to dialogue!

The image shows the trajectories of the evolution of emotions among members of a group of people resulting from solving a system of differential equations that capture some mathematical sociological behavior in (people) group dynamics. In this figure, at time 0, people started having intricated discussions until reaching peace in their emotions around time 400. Then, around time 500, people's emotions were deliberately perturbed to see if they would stabilize again...and they did around time 1300!  The stable emotion structures that a group can reach in this work is known as "structural balance", a concept that has been around sociology for more than fifty years. The beauty of this artwork rests upon the beauty of mathematics to capture, under simplifications, a social behavior.

CSEPSchuller LabCNSIUCSBMOXI