The Role of Emotions in the Design of Personalized Educational Systems

Research on modelling affect and on interfaces adaptation based on affective factors has matured considerably over the past several years, so that designers of educational products are now considering the inclusion of components that take affect into account. Emotions are considered to play a central role in guiding and regulating behaviour by modulating numerous cognitive and physiological activities. This paper introduces a new model in the field of adaptive hypermedia, which integrates cognitive and emotional parameters and attempts to apply them on a web-based learning environment. Our purpose is to improve learning performance and, most importantly, to personalize web-content to userspsila needs and preferences, eradicating known difficulties that occur in traditional approaches. The specific article emphasizes on the emotional aspect of our model, since it presents results of our efforts to measure and include emotional processing parameters, by constructing a theory that addresses emotion and is feasible in Web-learning environments.