As I was driving home Wednesday I was listening to Marketplace and heard about this new gadget developed by Philips Design and the Dialogues Incubator, a subsidiary of ABN AMRO, which is a bank in the Netherlands.

It’s called the Rationalizer, and the press release said that the device works as an “emotion mirror” for people who are at home doing serious stock trading. Fear and greed are the two driving factors that motivate trades, the press release said. Enter the Rationalizer, which is supposed to tell you when it thinks you’re going to make a trade based on fear or greed, so you can rethink your actions.

There are two parts to the system. One of them, the EmoBracelet, you wear on your wrist. The other is the EmoBowl, which sits near the person making the stock trades. Sensors in the EmoBracelet attempt to detect the trader’s emotions based on galvanic skin response. The more excited someone becomes, the higher the skin response. Lights on the bracelet and in the bowl become more active and change colors from yellow, to orange, to red.

It’s a pretty neat idea, but at this point, it’s just a concept, so I’m not sure how far it’ll go. I’m also not sure exactly how scientific this approach is. After all, there are other factors that might trigger the kind of galvanic skin response that a bad stock pick could cause.

You can see images and movies of the device over at the Rationalizer Web site.

Interested in other technologies that try to see into your soul? Take a look at these links:

How Lie Detectors Work
How Sweat Works
How Electronic Trading Works