School of Computing/Blekinge Institute of Technology
Abstract
Emotions are thought to be a key factor that critically influences human
decision-making. Emotion regulation can help to mitigate emotion related
decision biases and eventually lead to a better decision performance. Serious
games emerged as a new angle introducing technological methods to learning
emotion regulation, where meaningful biofeedback information displays player's
emotional state.
This thesis investigates emotions and the effect of emotion regulation on
decision performance. Furthermore, it explores design and evaluation methods
for creating serious games where emotion regulation can be learned and
practiced.
The scope of this thesis was limited to serious games for emotion regulation
training using psychophysiological methods to communicate user's affective
information. Using the psychophysiological methods, emotions and their
underlying neural mechanism have been explored. Through design and evaluation
of serious games using those methods, effects of emotion regulation have been
investigated where decision performance has been measured and analyzed. The
proposed metrics for designing and evaluating such affective serious games have
been exhaustively evaluated. The research methods used in this thesis were
based on both quantitative and qualitative aspects, with true experiment and
evaluation research, respectively.
Serious games approach to emotion regulation was investigated. The results
suggested that two different emotion regulation strategies, suppression and
cognitive reappraisal, are optimal for different decision tasks contexts. With
careful design methods, valid serious games for training those different
strategies could be produced. Moreover, using psychophysiological methods,
underlying emotion neural mechanism could be mapped to provide optimal level of
arousal for a certain task.
The results suggest that it is possible to design and develop serious game
applications that provide helpful learning environment where decision makers
could practice emotion regulation and subsequently improve their decision
making