Artificially Controlling Human Emotion

avant-garde

In the future, if mankind engineered a device that could voluntarily be used to control and manipulate our emotions for the better, should we use them?

Ouabache

We already have such a device. They are called actors. I had a college classmate who liked to yell in people's faces (he wanted to mess with), ranting off a loud tirade of insulting speech, becoming quite red in the face, and watch their reaction. After the first couple times, I knew it was a put on.. But he certainly manipulated their emotions..

avant-garde

I take that as a creative way to say "yes".

moose

We have many drugs that do this to an extent.

Santa1

I would be extremely careful as to what extent "to the better" would be taken.

Danger

How the hell do you pronounce your name?

wolram

It must be zero.

Santa1

The others call me Santa. =)

Anticitizen

Was it Ray Bradbury's 'Fahrenheit 451' or Phillip K. Dick's 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep' that had the box one could use to 'dial in' an emotion? The sci-fi dystopias run together dometimes. In that vein, you could always go the Orwellian '1984' route of simply removing all words for negative emotion from the lexicon. Pretty creative.

Montag42

But would removing the words we use to describe emotions really get rid of the emotions that the words we removed described?

And i'm pretty sure it was "do androids dream of electric sheep" btw.