Asserting Real-Time Emotions through Cued-Recall: Is it Valid?

Asserting emotions through free-recall is commonly used to evaluate user experience (UX) of interactive systems. From psychology we know that free-recall of emotions leads to a significant memory bias where participants rely on a few of the most intense episodes when asserting an overall experience. It is argued that cued-recall can reduce the memory bias in UX evaluations. Yet, this has not been studied empirically. We present a systematic empirical study based on 38 participants. We measured emotions in terms of objective galvanic skin responses (GSR) and subjective Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) ratings. We found significant correlations between emotions experienced in real-time and those experienced during cued-recall. This validates the use of cued-recall for UX evaluations. An implication is that HCI researchers and practitioners now have cued-recall as an alternative that significantly reduces the memory bias and enables highly detailed measurements of emotions while not disturbing participants during system interaction.