Using brain imaging to measure emotional response to product appearance

Brain imaging systems are a set of techniques that allow visualizing the regions of the brain that are activated when (emotional) stimuli are presented. Their advantage over traditional methods of measuring emotion, like self-reports is that they leave out response biases. This paper presents what brain imaging measurement can do for emotional design. It also reviews the brain imaging studies that have been performed in the field of emotional design. Very few such studies were found, and they were dispersed among different disciplines: design, marketing, advertising, human-computer interaction. One of the results of that investigation is that the complexity of brain imaging systems and of designing adequate experimental setups imply that brain imaging be reserved for some very specific purposes, like obtaining the very first impression of a product design.