Appraisal and Mental Contents in Human-Technology Interaction

User experience has become a key concept in investigating human-technology interaction. Therefore it has become essential to consider how user experience can be explicated using psychological concepts. Emotion has been widely considered to be an important dimension of user experience, and one obvious link between modern psychology and the analysis of user experience assumes the analysis of emotion in interaction processes. In this paper, the focus is on the relationship between action types and elicited emotional patterns. In three experiments including N = 40 participants each, it is demonstrated that the types of emotions experienced when people evaluate and use technical artefacts differ based on the stances they take toward these artefacts. One cannot approach user experience irrespective of the careful analysis of the situation-specific emotional themes. It is essential to any theory of user experience to consider the nature of the situation and relevant actions.peerReviewe

A UNIFIED TIMING AND SPECTRAL MODEL FOR THE ANOMALOUS X-RAY PULSARS XTE J1810-197 AND CXOU J164710.2-455216

Anomalous X-ray pulsars (AXPs) and soft gamma repeaters (SGRs) are two small classes of X-ray sources strongly suspected to host a magnetar, i.e. an ultra-magnetized neutron star with $B\approx 10^14-10^15 G. Many SGRs/AXPs are known to be variable, and recently the existence of genuinely "transient" magnetars was discovered. Here we present a comprehensive study of the pulse profile and spectral evolution of the two transient AXPs (TAXPs) XTE J1810-197 and CXOU J164710.2-455216. Our analysis was carried out in the framework of the twisted magnetosphere model for magnetar emission. Starting from 3D Monte Carlo simulations of the emerging spectrum, we produced a large database of synthetic pulse profiles which was fitted to observed lightcurves in different spectral bands and at different epochs. This allowed us to derive the physical parameters of the model and their evolution with time, together with the geometry of the two sources, i.e. the inclination of the line-of-sight and of the magnetic axis with respect to the rotation axis. We then fitted the (phase-averaged) spectra of the two TAXPs at different epochs using a model similar to that used to calculate the pulse profiles ntzang in XSPEC) freezing all parameters to the values obtained from the timing analysis, and leaving only the normalization free to vary. This provided acceptable fits to XMM-Newton data in all the observations we analyzed. Our results support a picture in which a limited portion of the star surface close to one of the magnetic poles is heated at the outburst onset. The subsequent evolution is driven both by the cooling/varying size of the heated cap and by a progressive untwisting of the magnetosphere.Comment: 15 pages, 12 figures, accepted for publication in Ap