Here is an interview with Donald Norman about the concept of mental models. It contains an interesting (and longer) passage about the possible relation between mental models and emotion:
A mental model provides an immediate expectation about what you think is going to happen and the emotional system will evaluate that positively (positive affect or valence) or negatively (negative affect or valence). […]
It’s good if we expect something bad that doesn’t happen and it’s bad if we expect something good that doesn’t happen. That impacts the way we feel if we continue using something (like a device) and it may impact what we do about it (continue use or abandon the device). […]
At the intellectual level there is also the causality issue. That is, do we decide to blame the device or ourselves?
Leave a Reply