As well as theories of emotion itself, raw emotion, there are also theories that come within the human-computer interaction area of the nature of experience. Based on experiences that are outside the digital domain and then used in order to understand the experiences that we design within digital products.
McCarthy and Wright, John McCarthy and Peter Wright, have written one of the more influential books about this. It’s certainly worth reading. And they talk, drawing on a lot of previous literature as well. They talk about four threads of experience. On one hand, the *sensual thread*, the sensual thread, which is that immediate visual, aural, tactile experience of something. The emotional impact of that, the way that changes the way you perceive things.
Then there's a sort of *deeper emotional level*, when you start to, that immediate response becomes something that you see in terms of relationships, in terms of your feelings about the world. Next, there's a point of – not necessarily next in series, but at a different level – is a sense of the way in which these integrate. And they call [them] the *compositional level* .
So that perhaps the thing that you've experienced is in some way sort of tying into past experiences. So you perhaps have smelt some cooking. You think, Oh, you know, this is lovely stuff, but it's going to be part of the meal we're about to have. But the meal we're about to have is because it's perhaps some anniversary or birthday, which ties into the whole sense of the family that goes around that.
So it becomes an integral part of something bigger. But then there’s also, there's a *spatio-temporal thread*. This is happening at a particular time in a particular place, and that also influences the nature of that experience. So the birthday party that's done in two places because you're remote and can't connect might be very different from the birthday party, perhaps held in the home you were brought up in or something like that.
So, where something happens, when it happens, also changes the nature of the experience. I will note too, quickly here, that when McCarthy and Wright talk about "emotional", they're of course, using "emotional" in the day-to-day sense, although they’re using it in their own specific sense. Not that use of "emotion" that psychologists use, which is the pure physical body reaction, which is closer to their sensual levels. So... you do have to realize that when you read literature,
these wordings do differ; be careful to understand what the person who's writing is actually using these words for. They then have a *sequential view* of an experience as well. So you can sort of think of a particular experience, like having that meal, in terms of stages. So there's an anticipation stage, “Oh, you know, we're going to have this meal together.” Perhaps you start to smell food and well, that’s part of the experience, part of anticipation.
You then have the experience itself. And there are these precognitive things like just being together, seeing the person, tasting it. And then the complex things that come with it. The sense of being community, perhaps a nostalgia if you’re perhaps remembering, perhaps somebody who used to be with you and is no longer with you. Then after the meal, you might look back at that and think, “Ah”.
It might have been a terrible meal, you might have had an argument, or you might look back and think, “Oh, that was a great experience.” And it becomes part of the stories you might tell in the future, the part of the way in which you see all those people, the people who were at that meal together. It connects into their past lives, the way you've seen them in the past and your whole experience of them. And then you might tell somebody else about, “Oh, I had this lovely meal.” Or you post onto Facebook and say, “We've had this fantastic meal.
It's nice to have been with X again.” And perhaps you talk about, "We were brought up together, we went to university together.” Something like that. So it suddenly becomes part of something bigger that may then feed into your future experiences.