EmotiStage: Designing an Emotion-Driven Performance System with Multi-modal Generative AI to Support Emotional Awareness

Abstract

Emotional awareness is a foundational component of mental well-being, yet existing digital tools often reduce emotional experience to labels, metrics, or inferred states. Such approaches overlook how emotional awareness is constructed through embodied, multi-modal experience and reflective sense-making. We present EmotiStage, an emotion-driven performance system powered by multi-modal generative AI that supports emotional awareness by enabling users to externalize, observe, and reinterpret emotions through music and stage performance. By guiding users through a creator-to-spectator transition, EmotiStage introduces aesthetic and psychological distance, allowing users to re-encounter their internal states as a staged performance. A mixed-method study (N = 13) suggests that EmotiStage supports emotional awareness by facilitating a progression from expression to observation, helping users visualize and re-experience emotional experiences. We contribute EmotiStage, a multi-modal generative AI system for emotional awareness, alongside exploratory empirical findings and design implications for using multi-modal generative arts to support emotional awareness in mental well-being contexts.