Emotional user experience: Traits, events, and states

•Individual differences in emotional responses in human–technology interaction were investigated.•Competence is affected by individual differences in planful problem solving trait.•Frustration is affected by individual differences in frustration tendency trait.•Self-confidence of the user affects emotional user experience.

Emotional experience has become an important topic in human–technology interaction research and design. Nevertheless, such research and design often lacks a proper explanatory basis and methodologically robust operationalisation. In this article, a conceptualisation of emotional user experience is formulated based on the appraisal theory of emotion, where the goal congruence of the interaction events and the task-independent individual traits are thought to underlie the user′s emotional response. A laboratory study with N=50 participants conducting ordinary computer tasks is reported. The results suggest that subjective emotional experience depends on a number of factors relating to individual differences in coping and task events. Emotional user experience, as analysed according to a competence–frustration model of emotion, is dependent on the user׳s technological problem-solving tendency, frustration tendency, pre-task self-confidence, and task performance.