Persuasive Strategies and Emotional States: Towards Emotion-Adaptive Persuasive Technologies Design

Abstract

Technologies have been shown to alter how people feel and create outlets for expressing positive and/or negative emotions. This indicates that persuasive systems, which rely on persuasive strategies (PS) to motivate behaviour change, have the potential to elicit emotions in users. However, there is no empirical evidence on whether or not PS evoke emotions and how to tailor PS based on emotional states. Therefore, we conduct a large-scale study of 660 participants to investigate if and how individuals respond emotionally to various PS and why. Our results show that some PS (such as Reward, Reduction, and Rehearsal) evoke positive emotion only, while others (such as Self-monitoring, Reminder, and Suggestion) evoke both positive and negative emotions at varying degrees and for different reasons. Our research links emotion theory with behaviour change models to develop practical guidelines for designing emotion-adaptive persuasive systems that employ appropriate PS to motivate behaviour change while regulating users’ emotion.