Girls Involved in Real Life Sharing: Utilizing Technology to Support the Emotional Development of Teenaged Girls.

This paper describes a new digital technology to support emotional self-awareness and empathy, called G.I. R.L. S (Girls Involved in Real Life Sharing). The system invited users to reflect actively upon and interact with a dialogue about how the story made them feel through the construction of pictorial narratives. In a pilot study with teenage girls, the system enabled the subjects to express themselves freely in a comfortable and meaningful way, and fostered an increase in emotional expressivity as compared to a control group. While the system has been tested with a small group of minority middleschool children, a web version of the system is in development that we believe will be useful for school counselors. Girls Involved in Real 3 Girls Involved in Real Life Sharing: Utilizing Technology to Support the Emotional Development of Teenaged Girls According to Payton et al. (2000), In an effort to help young people to establish positive relationships, to adapt to the demands of growing up, to contribute to the community and to make responsible decisions, educators have adopted programs that target areas such as risky sexual behavior, violence, school drop out, and drug use. Often, maintaining these programs become too complex to coordinate and do not have the impact that they could. Social and emotional learning programs, geared toward recognizing and managing emotions, establishing pro-social goals, enhancing interpersonal skills, and developing other pertinent skills, are becoming a comprehensive, rather than piece-meal way, to address these target areas (Payton et al.). The purpose of this research was to explore how digital technology can be used to supplement social and emotional programs. To date, there are only a handful of technologies with this goal in mind. For example, Granada Learning’s Just Like Series is an educational system that attempts to compel learners to think about emotions related to an event. The system includes four videos that portray real-life stories of children who have faced adversity (Group, n.d.). Activities in these videos are designed to help children begin to develop empathy for others and gain a better understanding of themselves. Although this environment encourages reflection, the stories and emotions are limited to the ones chosen by the software designers. A more open-ended environment where children can construct their own narratives may be more beneficial. One example of this type of environment is the Digital Diary developed in the Today’s Stories project. After collecting video from a Girls Involved in Real 4 personal camera, students review their video collaboratively and annotate episodes with signs and symbols that make explicit the interpretations of what they see in their experiences including their emotions. This environment allows children to construct narratives and annotate some emotions; however, it was not created for the explicit purpose of exploring emotions. G.I. R.L. S. is software geared toward supporting emotional self-awareness and empathy in teenage girls. With limited resources and recognizing that teenage girls and boys have different emotional styles and interests, we targeted just the girls in this version of the software. However, we expect that a slightly adapted version could be used with boys. The software was designed upon principles that are gender neutral – namely the constructionist theory of education (Papert, 1980) and narrative therapy (White & Epston, 1990). Constructionism asserts that people learn better when they are engaged in building personally meaningful artifacts that are reflected upon and shared with others in a community. Narrative therapy emphasizes the development of an individual’s selfand sharedunderstanding by telling their stories or writing them. In G.I. R.LS. , narrative serves as a vehicle for developing an understanding of an individual’s emotion. Overview of the Technology Girls Involved in Real Life Sharing is computer software geared toward allowing girls to think about the emotions related to their lives. The software guides girls through a series of windows – memory closet, character selection, pictorial narrative construction, suggestion, and emotional weighting – to produce a set of images, similar to a comic strip, about their story. The system begins with the “memory closet window,” Girls Involved in Real 5 a safe space where they can write about events in their lives. The system is set up so that all drafts of a user’s story are saved, much like a journal that can be reviewed later. In the next window, called the “character selection window”, girls are placed in the director’s seat and asked to select the characters that will star in their story. The system is designed with preset images of characters in order to emphasize the process of constructing the story rather than developing images of characters. Once students have chosen the stars of their stories, they are taken to the “pictorial narrative construction window” shown in figure 1, where they build scene-byscene images with captions representing specific incidents in the story. Figure 1. The pictorial narrative construction window. They can choose from a small selection of backgrounds, but they also have the option to use a small paint program to create their own scenes. Additionally, the names of the characters chosen in the character selection window appear in a list box. By selecting a name from the list and then selecting an emotion face, girls can choose the expressions Girls Involved in Real 6 for main characters in the story (excluding the character representing themselves). The goal of this feature is to encourage students to think about the emotions of the other characters in their stories and to use that reflection to select an expression. To be able to choose an expression for the character representing them, students must submit the caption to a natural-language-processing toolkit, called ConceptNet, which supports affective textual reasoning over documents (Liu & Singh, 2004). The system will then try to empathetically suggest emotions that relate to this event in the “suggestion window”. For example if the caption reads, . she was beating me and as she was beating she hit my mirror and broke it and said see what you made me do and beat me more harder. Then the next day I went to school with bruises on me and my friends were asking me what happened and I said nothing. That whole day I was walking around telling people not to touch me because it hurts (from a participant) The system would display, “Sounds like that may have made you feel fearful or maybe angry? ” At this juncture, the student can select from four buttons in the suggestion window, which read, “Yeah that’s how I felt,” “No, I didn’t feel that way,” “Maybe a little of both,” or “I don’t know. ” To further support this first reflection on her emotions, the student is then taken to an “emotional weighting” window. In this window the student can choose from nine emotions as well as have the option to type in her own emotion. The weighting can range from “not at all” to “a lot”, and is ideally based on how much the student felt she experienced the emotion. This reflection is important because this weighting determines how the main character (representing the student) will appear in the pictorial narrative Girls Involved in Real 7 construction window once the user is finished. For example, if the girl weights happy as “a lot”, the character will appear with a big smile. Each emotion and weighting is associated with a particular expressive appearance. Methods The research questions developed for this study were: 1) Does the labeling of emotions within the context of stories enhance emotional self-awareness? and 2) Can identifying the emotions of other actors in the story help the user to develop empathy for others? The main hypotheses derived from these questions were: Building a pictorial narrative, including labeling the emotions of other actors, will help users better identify the feelings of others. Building a pictorial narrative and exploring the emotional space supported by common sense reasoning technology will support greater emotional selfawareness than only building the pictorial narrative.