A case study of emotional interaction response with cutlery: EEG and semantic tools

Abstract

Emotions accompany our daily life, influence our interaction with products, and are essential to understanding human behavior through non-verbal communication. It becomes evident for designers the need to understand how products establish meaningful and emotional experiences, as well as work with tools that allow evaluating emotional responses. This article aims to evaluate the interaction of individuals with a cutlery object, through a case study. In this study, we applied Electroencephalography (EEG) – for the evaluation of qualitative and quantitative data, which allows us to obtain the physiological responses of individuals. The experiment consisted of three blocks of tasks: observing pictures of the product, observing the real product, and touching/handling the real product, based on a homogeneous sample of 11 participants. In the end, the participants answer a questionnaire. The results demonstrate that the questionnaires are an important assessment tool when correlated with other tools. It provided relevant information for the validation of the emotional response, being perceptible the typologies that evoked positive and negative effects, as well as the characteristics of the product that influenced this feeling. Regarding the EEG, the results showthat there are cognitive differences between the frequency bands and the positioning of the electrodes, for the different types of product. In the statistical analysis, it was not possible to identify significant differences in the study variables, possibly derived from the protocol changes throughout the study.