Red is angry, ice cream is happy - Capturing in the moment screen time emotions from children

Read, Janet C. and Horton, Matthew and Fitton, Daniel (2025) Red is angry, ice cream is happy - Capturing in the moment screen time emotions from children. In: IDC '25: Proceedings of the 24th Interaction Design and Children :. ACM, New York, pp. 1064-1068. ISBN 9798400714733

Abstract

Children’s screen use draws much attention from the media with the general narrative being that something needs to be done. In the IDC community, and beyond, many interventions and innovations are proposed and studies are carried out and report positive effects in many cases. One omission is in studies that report the first hand experience of children, another is in designing for children to take more control over their own screen use by managing their feelings and emotions and self regulating. In this work in progress paper we describe a small study that explored children’s emotions as they exited from a game. The contribution here is the method that we present as being easy to manage, fun to operate and reliable in its outcomes. We describe the work and suggest some further uses and extensions.