Three-minute Labs
🧭 The Corner Test
Two axes make four corners. A common myth is that the “happy + excited” corner is the best place to be. It isn’t — which corner people prize is cultural (Tsai’s ideal-affect research). Every corner is a real, useful place.
e.g. Excited — buzzy and good — but not the "goal" corner. Living here all day would be exhausting.
e.g. Calm — many cultures prize THIS corner (calm contentment) over the loud one — Tsai's research.
e.g. Frustrated — a real, useful place — it is the feeling that says "something needs to change".
e.g. Gloomy — heavy and quiet — a real place too. It is not "bad", and it passes like weather.
🎚️ Why one slider isn’t enough
Some apps ask you to rate your mood on a single slider from bad to good. But feelings have two directions, not one — pleasantness and energy. A one-slider tracker can’t tell these apart:
That missing second axis is exactly what the Map puts back.
🔭 The two axes (a quick recap)
In 1980 the psychologist James Russell showed that almost every feeling word sits somewhere on a circle drawn from just two directions: pleasantness (cold ↔ warm) and energy / arousal (still ↔ stirred-up). Scientists later asked about 1,800 grown-ups in the US to rate nearly 14,000 words on exactly those two dials — about 20 people for each word — those open ratings are the “where most people put it” you reconcile against on the Map. The circle is a description of how people rate words, not a rule about how you should feel.