Negative Emotion, Positive Performance? A Glimpse into Emotional Influences on Moving Target Selection

Moving target selection is one of the most fundamental interaction tasks in user interfaces involving dynamic content. In such kind of systems, many stimuli will cause individual positive or negative emotions. Users need to make the selection with the influences of these emotions, such as waving a stick to hit a fast-moving spider. In this study, we explored the effects of induced emotion on user performances in a time-constrained moving target selection task. We found that participants tended to select the targets faster but make more mistakes in positive emotion condition, while they select the targets slower with fewer mistakes in negative emotion condition. We discussed future research directions on this topic and how it could potentially help the design in user interfaces with dynamic content.