Exploring the relationship between an emotional experience with everyday products and its contribution to people’s well-being and life satisfaction

Abstract

Emotions have a huge impact on people in various ways. Learning ability, behaviour, and judgment are substantially influenced by Emotion (Analysis & Signals, 2017). Recent clinical studies have shown that positive emotion regulation in daily life has the advantage of preventing and solving health risks (e.g., reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease). Many previous studies illustrate that emotions have their own role, which shows that there are no good or bad emotions. Emotion itself is an important signal indicating a person's well-being. In the case of negative emotions, they can enrich the consumer experience (Desmet, 2010; Desmet, Fokkinga, Ozkaramanli, & Yoon, 2021): for instance, they play a very important role in human security. However, designers generally want products that elicit only good or pleasant emotions to affect users' emotions. Various emotions are indispensable for a person's well-being. Therefore, this paper explores how negative and positive emotions in interacting with the product are related to our happiness and life satisfaction. For this, a diary study was conducted to determine whether emotions provided by the product affect people's happiness and life satisfaction. Six participants were recruited and they participated in a three-week diary study. They were asked to rate their emotions with everyday products and also how the emotions contributed to their life satisfaction as well as happiness. An in-depth interview was conducted with their dairy. A total of 216 products were reported from the diary study, and related emotions were categorized into three groups: positive emotion, positive-negative emotion, and negative emotion. It was statistically analyzed how each group is correlated with their well-being and life satisfaction. The results indicate that only positive emotion is a major contributor to their well-being and life satisfaction than positive-negative emotion. The findings highlight that the more positive emotions are provided, the higher the user's happiness which can lead to an increase in life satisfaction. It was found that there is a discrepancy between findings from previous studies and those of our study. The implications and limitations of the study are discussed in the end.