A Study on Persuasive Technologies: The Relationship between User Emotions, Trust and Persuasion

A successful persuasive technology is able to persuade people to change from one state to a more well known state. Therefore, to allow for a change, persuasive technology must be able to affect users’ emotion and make the user trust the technology so that they will adopt the persuasive technology into their daily life routine, as well as continue to use the technology for long period. This paper is aimed to study the relation between users’ emotion with trust and persuasion and how they may contribute to the success of changing a person attitude or behavior towards a certain context or issue. Twenty five participants have completed the study in 6 weeks by using two types of persuasive technology that were assessed at three different interaction stages: pre, during and post. Result shows that emotions have a significant effect on trust, whereas the effect of emotions on persuasion using the persuasive technology was mediated by trust.