For grown-ups
What your child practices
AffectForge teaches emotion-science literacy — the way researchers actually describe feelings. Since Russell (1980), almost every feeling word can be placed on a map with two directions: pleasantness and energy. Your child predicts where a word belongs, then sees where thousands of real people rated it (open affective norms, Warriner et al. 2013), and reconciles the difference. The goal is not a “right answer” — it’s noticing that feelings have structure, and that people genuinely vary.
Every corner is a real place
AffectForge never ranks feelings or tells anyone to “get back to happy”. Which corner a culture prizes is itself variable (Tsai’s ideal-affect research). Calm, stirred-up, heavy, and buzzy are all real places on the map — the science describes them without judging them.
A map, not a mood tracker
This is the one promise that makes AffectForge different: it is a map, not a log. Where your child places a word is held only in memory while they play and then evaporates — it is never saved to the device or anywhere else. There is no diary, no history, no “how do you feel today?” check-in that gets stored. The word’s “where most people put it” is published research data, not a record of your child. There is no microphone and no camera.
Honest about what it is
AffectForge builds literacy about the science of feelings; it is not therapy and does not measure or diagnose anyone. The rater norms describe how people rate words — never how your child should feel. If a feeling stays big or heavy for a while, the strongest move is a real one: talk with a trusted grown-up. The crisis resources below are always one tap away.
Our privacy promise
AffectForge Play is free, works offline, and collects nothing. No accounts, no ads, no tracking, no microphone, no camera; nothing your child feels or places ever leaves this device. Only which labs have been played is saved, only in this browser.