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Affective approaches to information behavior research

Wednesday, 7 September 2016

Assigned reading

Today we consider affective, or emotion-based, approaches to information behavior research.

What are emotions?

There are two major approaches to emotions presented in relevant research (Lopatovska & Arapakis,

  1. Emotions are discrete
  2. Emotions are continuous

What are some of the differences in these approaches? How are they related?

Discrete emotions

There are a small number of "basic" emotions, such as happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, surprise. There is, of course, no consensus as to what comprises this set of basic emotions. These definitions also vary depending on cultural and linguistic norms related to the description and experience of emotions.

Continuous emotions

Emotions operate on a scale.

We usually talk about continuous emotions in terms of dimensions, and how the dimensions related to one another. There are three dimensions:

  1. Arousal/intensity: weak to strong experience of emotion
  2. Valence/semantic differential: positive to negative experience of emotion (ex. happy to sad, etc.)
  3. Activation: active to passive experience of emotionI think of this in terms of internal experience versus empathy. If an emotion comes from within as a direct response to some stimulus, then we can regard it as active. If we experience an emotion in situations where we are responding to other people's emption, then this migh tbe called passive. This dimension is not used in many studies, perhaps in part because it is difficult to identify and operationalize.

Emotions in information behavior research

We tend to focus on a few crude measures of emotion in information behavior research:

  1. Valence of emotional response to information interactions
  2. Satisfaction
  3. Frustration
  4. Self-efficacy

Cognition v. Emotion

Cognition and emotion are not terribly easy to tease apart. There are two primary approaches taken to understanding their distinctions and relationship to one another:

  1. Emotional response processed through cognition (thinking about feeling, self-aware emoting, intellectualizing emotional response)
  2. Somatic emotional response (understanding emotion )

Cognition as necessary element of emotion

The goal of this approach is to understand or explain subjective aspects of cognitive judgements. This approach seeks to identify the emotional antecedents or correlates of a cognitive appraisal.

This approach can be used when attempting to understand people's reactions to particular information systems, resources, or systems. It assumes that people are aware of their emotional states and can describe them, so it may not always be applicable.

Somatic factors of emotional expression

The goal of this approach is to describe expressions of emotions It often focuses on factors that are expressed physically. This can be either neuro-physiological responses like heart rate and galvanic skin response or observable responses like facial expression and body language.

This approach assumes that people may experience emotion subconsciously, and so may not be aware of their emotional states and responses.


Affective approaches to information behavior research - September 7, 2016 -