RELIABILITY OF EMOTIONAL RESPONSES TO MATERIAL TEXTURES

There has been much discussion around the value and impact of designing emotional influences. Nevertheless, a fundamental question not well addressed has been ‘just how reliable are emotions as a consideration within the design process?’ Texture stimuli were presented to participants in a decontextualised form to reduce the number of additional emotional cues and simplify the test procedure. It was found that reliability of emotional responses to material textures was low, but that there was greater reliability for those textures identified at the extremes of positive or negative emotional experience.