Emotion and Motivation: Understanding User Behavior of Web 2.0 Application

With the integration of social interaction and Web technologies, Web 2.0 has become an important Internet application. It also provides the flexibility to integrate various user motivations into one kind of information system (e.g., for a utilitarian purpose or a hedonic purpose). In this paper, we will examine the influence of user motivations and emotion factors on user behavior in the Web 2.0 environment. We designed two experimental tasks based on different user motivations and collected self-report data from the participants. According to the PLS (Partial Least Squares) analysis, our study demonstrated that emotions affected users´ perceived belief in the Web 2.0 application and positive emotions had a more powerful influence on perceived belief than negative emotion. Additionally, as for motivation, we demonstrated that utilitarian and hedonic purposes had a moderate effect on the relationship between perceived belief and user attitude in the Web 2.0 application.