EMOTION AND DESIGN

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EMOTION AND DESIGN

• Yoram Chisik
• Humans, Cognition, Computers
• October 22, 2002

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Affect and Cognition

• The cognitive mechanisms are the ones that allow
  us to interpret, understand, reflect upon, and
  remember things about the world.
• The affect and emotion mechanisms rapidly
  evaluate events to provide an initial assessment
  of their overall value with respect to the
  person, e.g. or bad, safe or dangerous, etc.
• Reaction occurs within 3-4 milliseconds of a
  stimulus being shown.

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Affect and Cognition

• Although neurologically distinct functionally
  affect and cognition are deeply intertwined.
  This discussion has been raging for centuries in
  both physiological and philosophical circles
  (Descartes and beyond)
• Purpose of affect to evaluate the world and what
  is happening in it
• Purpose of cognition the interpretation of what
  is happening in the world

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Three Levels of Information Processing

• Reaction
• Routine
• Reflective

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Reaction

• Genetically determined, no learning involved
  hardwired immediate response to state
  information.

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Routine

• Skilled and well learned behaviour such as
  speaking, driving.
• Feeds on and impacts reaction and reflection by
  assessing the response to routine behaviour.
• Assessment results in three dimensions of affect
  and emotion, positive, negative and arousal
  (energetic).
• Contextual evaluation, a cookie can be both tasty
  (positive) and fattening (negative).

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Reflection

• a process in which the mind processes its
  representation of the world, its current state
  and its current reaction to that state and
  events. The reflection level does not receive
  direct sensory input, nor is it capable of direct
  control of behaviour.
• Affect impacts the reflection processes thus
  negative affect accompanied by high levels of
  arousal leads to focused and deep processing
  manifesting itself as tunnel vision and positive
  affect leads to broader processing resulting in
  greater creativity.

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Interpreting Emotions

• Physical vs. Cognitive
• Cognitive That was an important goal to me and
  you prevented me from attaining it therefore I
  am angry.
• Physical emphasizes the physiological response
  that co-occurs with an emotion such as a rise in
  heart rate, hand perspiration
• Back to Descartes

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Detecting Emotional State

• The cognitive approach
• Contextual interviews
• Emocards

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Detecting Emotional State
Physical Indicators

• Facial Expression
• Voice Intonation
• Gestures, movement
• Posture
• Pupilary dilation
• Respiration

• Heart rate, pulse
• Temperature
• Voice Intonation
• Perspiration
• Muscle action potential
• Blood pressure

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Affective Computing
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Chartjunk or Goldgraph

• Kurosu and Kashimura, Tractinsky, et al and
  Hassenzahl, et al what is beautiful is usable,
  Engineering Joy
• Norman and Tufte
• Lindgaard and Dudek Importance of context,
  entertainment seeking vs goal seeking

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Design Implications

• People do not respond to interactive software as
  a tool but bring social rules, learned behaviour
  and interpretations.
• Importance of the first impression
• Importance of context, random vs., goal seeking
  behaviour
• Social Interfacing, education, Robotics (Aibo,
  Arthur and Barney)
• Improvement in the experience not just an
  improvement in efficiency
• Alleviating frustration