Emotion Task Analysis: Proposing a Tool for the Assessment of Emotional Components in a Task

Abstract

Emotion is critical to human experience and is an integral part of perception, cognition, and behavior. While the mechanisms and precise measurement of emotion has been debated in the literature, researchers have theorized that emotion is related to activation across physiological, experiential, and behavioral response systems. This has important implications in human factors research and practice. Just as the cognitive task analysis was proposed to be used in tandem with hierarchical task analyses to account for cognitive components of a task, the current paper proposes a method to account for emotional components of a task. The emotion task analysis is proposed for the purpose of explicating emotion from an individual. Specifically, in order to account for emotional load and/or processes elicited during a task and to be used in tandem with previously established task analyses by usability/user experience researchers and human factors practitioners.