Persuasive strategies and emotional states: towards designing personalized and emotion-adaptive persuasive systems

Persuasive strategies have been widely operationalized in systems or applications to motivate behaviour change across diverse domains. However, no empirical evidence exists on whether or not persuasive strategies lead to certain emotions to inform which strategies are most appropriate for delivering interventions that not only motivate users to perform target behaviour but also help to regulate their current emotional states. We conducted a large-scale study of 660 participants to investigate if and how individuals including those at different stages of change respond emotionally to persuasive strategies and why. Specifically, we examined the relationship between perceived effectiveness of individual strategies operationalized in a system and perceived emotional states for participants at different stages of behaviour change. Our findings established relations between perceived effectiveness of strategies and emotions elicited in individuals at distinct stages of change and that the perceived emotions vary across stages of change for different reasons. For example, the reward strategy is associated with positive emotion only (i.e. happiness) for individuals across distinct stages of change because it induces feelings of personal accomplishment, provides incentives that increase the urge to achieve more goals, and offers gamified experience. Other strategies are associated with mixed emotions. Our work links emotion theory with behaviour change theories and stages of change theory to develop practical guidelines for designing personalized and emotion-adaptive persuasive systems.