ABSTRACT
Although emotion is not as well understood as cognition, both of them can be considered as information-processing systems (Ellsworth & Scherer, 2003), but with different functions and operating parameters. Cognition would allow an interpretation of the world and make it meaningful to the person, whereas emotions would be more judgmental, assigning positive and negative valences to the environment (Norman, 2002b, 2004a; Russell, 2003). Scherer (2005) described various affective states and especially proposed distinguishing utilitarian emotions and aesthetical emotions. These two kinds of emotions result from an appraisal of environmental or proprioceptive information, but they have different functions. Utilitarian emotions, such as anger or fear, allow the adaptation to events that may have important consequences for individuals. These adaptive functions consist, for instance, of the preparation of actions (such as confrontation or escape) or the recuperation and reorientation of work. In contrast, aesthetical emotions are not related to the necessity to satisfy vital and mandatory needs. For instance, a person can be impressed or fascinated or show admiration. Such diffuse sensations highly differ from the felt excitation and orientation of behaviors in the case of utilitarian emotions. In this chapter, we focus on emotions that are conveyed by images or words and that could be related, to such an extent, to aesthetical emotions. More precisely, we analyze their effect on cognitive treatments performed by designers during creative design problem solving.
