Appraisal and Mental Contents in Human-Technology Interaction

Introduction

User experience research has made its way among traditional ways of approaching emotional and aesthetic human-technology interactions, such as Kansei engineering, funology, design for pleasure, affective design, emotional design, and affective ergonomics (Hassenzahl & Tractinsky, 2006; Kuniavsky, 2003; Law, Roto, Hassenzahl, Vermeeren, & Kort, 2009; Nagamachi, 2011; Norman, Miller, & Henderson, 1995; Wright & McCarthy, 2005). User experience, from a user psychological point of view, can be thought to entail, among other things, a person’s emotions and perceptions of interaction (Bargas-Avila & Hornbaek, 2011; Moran, 1981; Saariluoma, 2003; Saariluoma & Jokinen, 2014; Saariluoma & Oulasvirta, 2010). Behind all these research paradigms with very similar goals one can find different ways of applying psychological thinking to understand how people meet technical artefacts, and for this reason it makes sense to ask if the efforts of different approaches in human-technology interaction can be conceptually unified within a common framework (Saariluoma, 2004; Saariluoma & Oulasvirta, 2010).

In the search for unification, it reasonable to explicate and operationalise modern paradigms within the framework of user psychology (Saariluoma, 2005; Saariluoma & Oulasvirta, 2010). This presupposes using empirical methodologies, experimental paradigms, theoretical concepts, and modern psychological theoretical generalisation. Thus, user psychology could be seen as a similar application area of modern psychology as traffic psychology, school psychology, work psychology, clinical psychology, or geropsychology, which are all divisions within psychology based on an importance of the practical field. This new field of applying psychological thinking would thus entail the whole human dimension of human-technology interaction (Moran, 1981; Saariluoma, 2003). Psychology is, of course, not the only relevant research field in studying user experience. For example, marketing, art research and design, information systems work, and engineering also have important roles in this discourse. However, psychology and cognitive science, as the basic sciences working with the details of human mind, must take part in the discourse on user experience. Thus, it is possible that the other approaches to user experience could eventually be reduced to applied human research and psychology.

The key theoretical notions of modern cognitive scientific and the psychological concept of the mind are anchored to the notions of mental representation, as such derivatives as schemas, productions, or mental models (Anderson, Farrell, & Sauers, 1984; Johnson-Laird, 1983; Markman, 1999; Neisser, 1976; Newell & Simon, 1972). The knowledge of mental representations enables psychologists to explain why people behave as they do (Markman, 1999). The very idea of representation is historical and can be found in different forms in the works of philosophers such as Locke and Hume (ideas and impressions), as well as Kant (1781) and Schoepenhauer (1818-1819/1969) (Vorstellung, i.e., representation). However, despite the intuitive clarity of the concept, psychological interpretations of mental representation have varied over the last 40 or 50 years. During this time, representations of emotions have received their own treatment (e.g., Beck, 1976; Dolan, 2002; Maio, 2010; Oatley, 1992; Power & Dalgleish, 1997).