Emotional user experience and feeling of control

Current research on emotional user experience lacks a clear exposition on the relationship between feeling of control and the emotion response. The appraisal theory of emotion posits that perceived control over an event is an important factor in determining the emotional response to the event. It is therefore hypothesised, that the relationship between emotional experiences and interaction events is mediated by feeling of control. In an experiment (N = 38), participants used a joystick to control game objects, and gave self-reports of their emotional states and feeling of control. Pathway analyses predicting the factors of emotional experience with event logs reveal that feeling of control is a strong mediator in how interaction events are related to the user's feeling of competence and frustration.