Keynote

Measuring Odor-Evoked Emotion for Personal Care Product Design

Odors readily become associated to emotions and can thereby influence behavior. Perfume becomes essential in consumer choice as personal-care products have become more similar and differentiation has become a challenge on emotional characteristics. This talk will give an overview of measurements for odor-evoked emotion including verbal conscious measures, non-verbal conscious measures, implicit reaction measures, and physiological reaction measures. The a serious of studies for how to combine measures, how to investigate and identify cultural effects, and how to derive results for the design of personal care products will be introduced. The effects of self-report rating, EMG, and skin conductance are mostly useful and facial expression is not effective as expected.

Pei-Luen Patrick Rau is a professor in the department of Industrial Engineering at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Since 2002, he has founded and directs HCI and Usability research center at Tsinghua University, and also directs Institute of Human Factors and Ergonomics at Tsinghua University. He was an adjunct professor at Yonsei University in Korea, a visiting scholar at Microsoft Research Asia in China, visiting professor at the RWTH Aachen University in Germany, and a visiting professor at the Chuo University in Japan. His research themes include cross-cultural design, technology acceptance, and design for elderly. Prof. Rau has published several articles on these topics in the HCI and related journals and conferences.

KANSEI: The Implications from Economic Experiments on Music and Decision-making

Music is one of the universal languages among humans, and it often influences on mood and emotion. In Takeuchi lab’s recent study, they examine the effect of music on decision-making under risk and ambiguity. To detect the effect, the participants are exposed to different types of music (peaceful or sad) for different groups while they are answering the questionnaire with monetary rewards. They find, for example, that participants listening to sad music are more risk-neutral than the other groups. This result implies that the sad emotion enhances the systematic processing strategy and leads individuals calculating the expected return with a risk-neutral formula rather than just making the choice intuitively. Then, Takeuchi interprets the concept of Kansei in the framework of economics. First, notice that the economics, including behavioral economics, is grounded on Revealed Preference Theory. It claims that the preference of a consumer is (should be) inferred by what the consumer actually buys under a given situation, not by what s/he says about her/himself. Then, we say, the preference is revealed by her/his choice. Revealed Preference Theory used to be behaviorism in its original spirit. That behaviorism, however, works the other way around and starts over-emphasizing the consistency among the choices, so that economic theories and models can be meaningful under the consistency. It seems that the internal and interim processes of decision-makings have become unnecessary and inconvenient subjects in economics. Kansei will be the key factor to reconsider the behaviorism in economics and provide better understandings towards anomalies that have been reported in behavioral economics and experimental economics for the last decades.

Professor Takeuchi is an associate professor of economics at Hitotsubashi University. He received his BA in Economics from Hitotsubashi University and PhD from the University of Michigan. After his PhD, he worked as a postdoctoral scholar at California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and then joined Hitotsubashi University in 2008. His research focuses on experimental economics, intertemporal choice and auction mechanism. His experiments also apply eye-tracking technology to investigate the internal process of decision-makings and, in the most recent experiment, he uses beetles as subjects to test Nash equilibrium concept. Professor Takeuchi has served as the associate editor for Economic Inquiry and for Japanese Economic Review, and Committee Member of Preliminary Bar Examination for Ministry of Justice. He was a Senior Scientific Research Specialist for Ministry of Education in 2014/2015.