The evaluation of emotional experience on webpages: an event-related potential study

Different webpage appearances may induce different emotional experiences of users. What may happen in users’ brain from when they see the webpage to when they reveal emotional experience is still unknown. Thus, this study requires the participants to evaluate their emotional experience on webpages by pressing the mouse, with their electroencephalogram being recorded. By analyzing the average amplitude of event-related potentials, we find that at the early stage of cognitive process, parietal N1 component is sensitive to the arousal of emotional experiences. The P2 can distinguish webpages with medium emotional experience from those with good emotional experience. The late positive potential (LPP) shows enhanced responses to webpages with both good and poor emotional experiences, while the emotional processing represented by LPP shows cerebral lateralization at the frontal and fronto-central areas. The findings can not only help to better understand the emotional processing from the perspective of electrophysiology, but also provide reference measures to evaluate webpage design and assess its impact on users’ emotion.