University of Twente Student Theses
Symbolic product meaning and commitments as predictors of product emotions.
Sieverink, Linda (2011) Symbolic product meaning and commitments as predictors of product emotions.
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| Abstract: | The aim of this study was to explore the possibility of predicting product emotions based on knowledge of people’s commitments and the symbolic meaning of products. Product emotions are formed by a process wherein people evaluate the product in the light of their concerns, to determine if the product is useful or harmful for their well-being. When a product is evaluated as useful for their well-being, pleasant emotions will arise and when the product is evaluated as harmful, unpleasant emotions will arise. This usefulness can be determined by analysing the symbolic meaning of a product design, which can be communicated by different product characteristics, for example the product form. Several theories imply that congruence between concerns and the symbolic meaning of a product will lead to a positive response. This article reports an empirical study that investigated the relationship between commitments, a type of concern, and the emotional product experience. The expectation was that a high degree of congruence between commitments and the symbolic meaning of a product design would lead to more pleasant emotions and a low degree of congruence would lead to more unpleasant emotions. An online experiment containing two non-verbal selfreport measurement tools was performed to measure the commitments that people find important in life and their emotional response towards six floor lamp designs. The results show that the degree of congruence can be seen as an indicator for predicting product emotions, but the direction of predictions found was not consistent. |
| Item Type: | Essay (Master) |
| Faculty: | BMS: Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences |
| Subject: | 77 psychology |
| Programme: | Psychology MSc (66604) |
| Link to this item: | https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/61027 |
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