Applicability of interactive evolutionary computation to mental health measurement

We show experimentally the applicability of interactive evolutionary computation (IEC) to a new application field, mental health measurement. We had 3 schizophrenics and 5 mentally healthy students design happy and sad impression computer graphics (CG) fighting images using IEC and asked other 33 students to evaluate the CG images using Scheffe´s method of paired comparison. Statistical tests of the evaluations showed that the range of emotional impressions perceived by the three schizophrenics between happy-sad was significantly narrower than that which was perceived by the mentally healthy students (p < 0.01). This experimental result implies that IEC has potential to contribute to psychiatry, and it also showed the possibility to expand IEC applicability beyond conventional system optimization and to a new area, mental health measurement.