ThinkHuman.tv

Most US educators and mental health professionals now recognize social emotional skills as crucial to young people’s success and wellbeing. Research indicates that emotional flexibility and resilience enable better stress management, serve as a protective factors against anxiety and depression, and improve academic performance. Adolescents in underserved communities are in particular need of support in fostering such skills as they face increased social and academic pressures often compounded by stressors associated with issues such as poverty and violence. The need has become even more acute in the context of the coronavirus pandemic. At the same time, solutions that purport to build social and emotional skills have a common problem: content that usually can’t live up to emotionally compelling Hollywood productions combined with a lack of cultural responsiveness that leads to learner disengagement and poor outcomes.

Developed with support from the National Science Foundation, ThinkHuman.tv integrates directly with major streaming sites (including free ones like Peacock to ensure equal access) to enable the improvement of essential social emotional skills such as perspective-taking and emotion regulation. Leveraging the streaming services’ vast and diverse catalogs enables ThinkHuman.tv to deliver truly compelling and culturally responsive training content for all learners, coupled with an evidence-based, practice-driven emotion science curriculum that facilitates skill and knowledge transfer. 

The platform’s training methodology is based in part on the Affectifi founders’ doctoral and post-doctoral research at Columbia University, which has been published in the American Education Research Journal and presented at the SEL Exchange conference, the Association for Psychological Science conference, and elsewhere. The platform is powered by a proprietary, classic AI training engine developed on the basis of a new, comprehensive emotion system model, while the user experience is delivered via a browser extension which interfaces with streaming sites.

Adolescents and young adults are an underserved population when it comes to social emotional programming and research as the bulk of such efforts are directed at younger age groups. Yet this population could benefit from support in building their socio-emotional skills as they face increased social and academic pressures in middle school, high school and college, and begin to navigate romantic, academic, and professional relationships. This goes double for learners in lower income communities: they often receive fewer opportunities for social emotional learning while being in greatest need of support developing skills like emotional resilience given the additional stressors associated with issues like poverty. ThinkHuman.tv is capable of providing effective, engaging, culturally responsive, and accessible social emotional learning to adolescents and young adults of virtually all backgrounds and all communities at scale by leveraging diverse stories they genuinely like and relate to, coupled with the latest learning and emotion science.

Affectifi has been actively seeking to better understand how to best serve adolescents and young adults of diverse backgrounds in the K12, higher education, and mental health contexts. To that end, Affectifi now has pilots getting under way at 4 schools (1 public high school, 1 public middle school, and 2 private high schools), as well as with a half dozen mental health professionals, with dozens more in the pipeline. Previously, Affectifi ran a private beta from June 2021 to October 2021 with over 100 educators, parents, graduate, undergraduate and high school students to assess user interest and usage patterns. 

Affectifi has also run user tests with high school and college students (N=58; see table below), as well as with a group of recent NYC high school graduates, who unanimously endorsed the platform leading to a pilot with the NYC Department of Education. As part of the DOE pilot, Affectifi is working with a team of young POC facilitators from NYC public schools who are helping design the training experience. 

Results of student user testing (N=58)

Agree / strongly agree

98% ---------------------- Using TV and film clips to practice applying emotion concepts was enjoyable

96% ---------------------- The content was easy to understand

93% ---------------------- The application was easy to use

98% ---------------------- Using film and TV clips is an effective way to approach emotion topics with students

90% ---------------------- Likely to recommend it as an SEL tool for students

93% --------------------- Using the application long term would improve my understanding of emotions 

The above testing and pilots are being used to adjust training content, media library selection, and other aspects of the user experience to better fit the needs of Affectifi’s target users.

Affectifi has also partnered with Research Schools International to conduct assessments of the platform’s usability and impact in the high school classroom, and has initiated an efficacy study in collaboration with Prof. J. Brashiers at LaGuardia Community College in NYC, aimed at assessing the impact of sustained use of the Affectifi platform within a diverse community college population. An earlier efficacy study at Columbia showed that two weeks of using the platform led to significant improvement in emotion management compared to a control. Efficacy studies are also planned in the clinical context in partnership with mental health professionals such as Dr. Alla Landa, a clinical psychologist at Columbia University. 

Affectifi is actively seeking more partner schools and mental health practitioners and organizations as it works to get more input on its platform from users and stakeholders. It is also working to refine its business model and develop relationships with streaming services and platforms having initiated early discussions with Disney, YouTube and Warner Media. Affectifi would welcome the support of the MIT Solve team in all these areas.

ThinkHuman.tv is the only social-emotional/EQ training solution that integrates directly with streaming media platforms to allow learners to improve their skills while watching their favorite content. No other organization is currently able to offer our technology or training methodology. 

By tapping into the enormous power, appeal and diversity of popular media and coupling it with the latest emotion science and learning research, ThinkHuman.tv is able to boost engagement and to deliver more consistent and robust learning outcomes than alternative solutions. It also facilitates the integration of social emotional skill development into existing school practices by enabling teachers to easily leverage media that they already use in the classroom, such as Disney+ content, to foster key skills like perspective-taking and emotional literacy. 

Moreover, due to the unique nature of Affectifi’s methodology which focuses on grasping fundamental emotion science principles, ThinkHuman.tv is able to offer precise, performance-based social emotional skill assessment, which is of value to educators, mental health professionals, and learners themselves. Such performance measurement is notoriously difficult in the social-emotional/EQ context, and most alternative solutions fail to meaningfully address this issue. 

Finally, the ThinkHuman.tv engine is capable of being integrated with any streaming application. In the longer term, Affectifi is seeking to achieve such integration to enable users to access ThinkHuman.tv training on TVs, tablets, and mobile phones, enabling truly ubiquitous emotional literacy development. Affectifi has already begun discussions with several major streaming services including Disney and YouTube. 

Affectifi’s impact goals for the next 5 years include:

• Improve therapy outcomes by integrating systemic emotion knowledge & skill assessment and development in the practice of 5K+ mental health professionals

• Make easy, engaging and effective social emotional skill development a consistent component of the educational experience in 10K+ schools

• Measurably improve key social emotion skills like emotional awareness, cognitive empathy, and self-regulation in 5M+ young people

• Make effective emotional literacy training easily accessible to 100M+ people worldwide via integrations with streaming service applications

To accomplish the above goals, Affectifi is working to scale its platform in education, mental health, and media markets using the following strategies.

In the mental health space:

• Enabling online self-service by mental health professionals, coupled with direct sales outreach and targeted ads (goal to reach 60% self-service sales by 2023)

• To support the above, Affectifi is working to enhance its online presence via search engine optimization and a more compelling landing page with guidance from one of its advisors, Elias Ek, who runs a successful marketing business

• Direct sales targeting larger psychological services/outpatient organizations 

• Distribution partnerships with digital psychology services platforms such as BetterHelp and coaching/wellness platforms such as BetterUp (in discussions)

• Partnerships with organizations providing resources to individuals on the autism spectrum such as autismproject.org and the Asperger/Autism Network (AANE)

In the education market:

• Direct sales to individual schools and districts

• Presence on edtech clearinghouse platforms such as Global Grid for Learning

• Distribution partnerships with growing K12 edtech companies seeking to expand into SEL such as Paper (discussions in progress) and those seeking to bolster existing SEL offerings such as Everfi (in discussions)

• Distribution partnerships/integration with educational managed IT solutions such as the K-12 Technology Group

• Partnerships with existing Social Emotional Learning programs such as RULER (discussions in progress with the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence)

In the media market:

• Partnerships with established social impact media organizations such as Common Sense Media (in discussions)

• Partnerships with streaming services such as Disney, YouTube, HBO (in discussions)

• Partnerships with streaming technology solutions such as Roku, Chromecast

Further, Affectifi is working with Prof. Richard Lane of the University of Arizona, the creator of the Levels of Emotional Awareness Scale (LEAS), to integrate the technology behind online scoring of the LEAS--the program for open-ended scoring (POES)--into the ThinkHuman.tv platform. The LEAS has been validated and used in scores of clinical and SEL studies, and the POES will allow for the automated scoring of open-ended responses with regard to the level of emotional awareness demonstrated by the user. This technology will add a powerful capability for performance-based emotional assessment to the platform.

Besides tracking the number of partners, customers and users, Affectifi has been conducting and will continue to conduct efficacy studies to demonstrate the benefits of its EQ training solution. The first study (N=46) showed significant improvement in emotion management among graduate students following two weeks of using the platform compared to a control. A follow-up study with community college students is currently underway, with additional studies focused on the K12 population planned in the next several months. In these studies, Affectifi will seek to demonstrate both proximal benefits in the form of improvements in social and emotional skills, as well as more distal outcomes such as reductions in the incidence of anxiety and depression, reduced behavioral issues, improved classroom climate, and improved academics and graduation rates. These outcomes most closely align with UN Sustainable Development Goals 3 and 4 (Good Health and Well-being, and Quality Education), and are also related to Goal 16 (Peace, Justice, and Good Institutions). In analyzing the results, special attention will be paid to traditionally underserved students, such as people of color and those of low socio-economic status, as well as students with special needs.

Adolescent and young adult learners have been shown to be resistant to more prescriptive social-emotional learning programs that simply teach them the “right” way to behave in specific situations. When working with these age groups, better outcomes have been achieved with interventions that provide a new conceptual framework, or mental model, of emotional functioning, which changes how learners view themselves, other people, and social situations. This is why Affectifi’s training focuses on teaching fundamental emotion science principles such as situational appraisal. Understanding such principles helps build a more accurate mental model of emotions, leading to more effective social problem-solving, better self-regulation, and increased empathy.

At the same time, social and emotional learning can’t be done in the abstract. It must be grounded in concrete, meaningful, and authentic examples of emotions and behavior, which is why most SEL programs rely on narrative in some form. To that end, Affectifi makes use of high quality popular media, such as TV and film, which enables the teaching of psychological principles to be grounded in concrete, compelling and widely varied examples of human emotion and behavior. High quality (e.g. critically acclaimed and commercially successful) film and TV content offers two critical advantages over other forms of narrative: it represents a closer perceptual facsimile of real life than e.g. written narrative in that a learner can observe characters’ facial expressions, body language, and tone of voice, and it has proven itself to be emotionally compelling by garnering critical acclaim and attracting a large audience. As such, it offers an ideal vehicle for socio-emotional training.

Affectifi has previously run an efficacy study which demonstrated that two weeks of using the platform leads to significant improvement in emotion management.  The study adds to a wealth of pertinent research suggesting that sustained use of the application (e.g. over the course of a semester) would be expected to produce positive social-emotional outcomes including: greater emotion knowledge; greater emotional awareness; improved perspective-taking and cognitive empathy; improved emotion regulation; and reduced incidence of high stress, anxiety and depression. 

Research has previously shown that socio-emotional benefits such as those described above may be expected to be accompanied by educational benefits, such as: improved academic performance, especially in areas such as reading comprehension and other English language arts (ELA) skills; reductions in absenteeism, and improved classroom climate, among others.

The ThinkHuman.tv training experience is delivered via a browser extension which interfaces with streaming sites, and is coupled with a standalone website that provides other features such as analytics. The solution grew out of years of research by Affectifi’s founders who are cognitive science faculty at Columbia Teachers College specializing in social and emotional learning. It is powered by a proprietary, classic AI exercise generation engine which offers unique flexibility in that a user can train with any media narratives (movies or TV shows) in any order while still seamlessly progressing through the training curriculum. For example, one user might choose 'Orange is the New Black' and 'Star Wars', while another may go with 'When They See Us' and 'The Queen’s Gambit', yet both would engage with the appropriate emotion exercises given the content they were watching and their position within the curriculum. The engine is designed based on a newly developed emotion system model and relies on the emotional ‘mapping’ of narratives (films and TV shows) which is used to generate training exercises. The mapping entails the identification of processes and factors (such as appraisals, goals, beliefs, and needs) involved in characters’ emotional responses in a given scene. Affectifi has filed a provisional patent application for its approach to coupling social emotional training with narrative media. Additionally, the mapping described above creates a unique database that represents the emotional and semantic layer of media narrative. Affectifi is at work on a search feature that will make this data layer accessible to users and other 3rd parties. 

Affectifi was founded by a hispanic woman who is the daughter of an immigrant (Mel) and a first generation immigrant (Ilya). As such, both founders are keenly, personally conscious of the importance and value of social and cultural diversity, and are purposeful about ensuring such diversity on their team, which is currently 50% people of color and 50% female out of 10 members. This awareness also extends to the choice of digital narratives that serve as the vehicle for emotion learning. Affectifi is very deliberate in making sure that both the films and tv shows used for training, and the examples used in the curriculum, reflect the diversity of its users.

B2B2C subscription model targeting educational institutions and mental health professionals as a beachhead. Schools pay $6 per student or $150 per teacher per year for access to the platform. Mental health professionals pay $20 per client per month. These price points have been validated by the pilots already secured with educational institutions like the NYC Department of Education, as well as with several mental health professionals.

Future areas of growth include corporate training, emotional intelligence certifications & other individual premium plans, and direct integration with streaming service apps.

In the next two years, Affectifi expects to fund operations and R&D through a combination of sales revenue, loans, grants (including an NSF Phase II SBIR grant, as well as DOE and NIH/NIMH SBIR grants), and equity financing. It has previously raised over $500K from grants (e.g. NSF SBIR Phase I) and family and friends, and is currently raising an additional round of funding. Investors in the current round include Startup Health Ventures, which is helping Affectifi gain exposure and bring on additional investment. In addition, as a benefit corporation focused on positive social impact, Affectifi is in the process of obtaining a fiscal sponsorship which will enable it to receive tax-deductible donations and grants from foundations and high net worth individuals. 

Affectifi projects reaching breakeven in 2023, and attaining annual revenues of $70M+ by 2026 from ~20K customers in the education and mental health space.

• NSF Phase I SBIR Grant (6/19): $225K non-dilutive SBIR grant from the National Science Foundation

• F&F round (5/20): $160K raised from family and friends with $4M pre-money valuation

• Ongoing pre-seed round ($55K raised so far): $15K raised from F&F round investor via a SAFE with $6M cap & 20% discount; $20K in investment + $200K in services raised from Startup Health Ventures via a SAFE set to convert to 2% at next valuation raise; $20K raised from two additional angel investors
  

• Currently in due diligence for NSF Phase II grant: $1M non-dilutive award with the possibility of up to $500K additional matching funds

• Revenues to date approaching $10K ARR since coming out of private beta in Oct '21, including paid pilots with the NYC Dept of Education and Regis HS in NYC