System architecture for psychological customization of communication technology

Personalization is a process that changes the functionality, interface, information content, or appearance of a system to increase its personal relevance to an individual. Personalization systems accommodate individual´s needs and interests explicitly through changes and selections initiated by the user, and implicitly through automatic adaptation techniques. Currently most of the emphasis in personalization systems is geared towards the utilitarian aspects of personalized information delivery. However, what is lacking is the customization of information based on its likely emotional and cognitive effects on different users of communication technology. Information presented to individual users or a group of users may be customized on the basis of the immediate emotional and cognitive types of psychological effects it is likely to enable or create in certain individuals or groups. Both content and its way of presentation (modality, visual layouts, ways of interaction, structure) may be varied. Despite obvious complexities empirical evidence suggests that the way of presenting information to certain psychological profiles has predictable psychological effects. For instance, one may facilitate positive emotion for users with certain personality type or more efficient learning for certain cognitive styles. This is the basic concept of mind-based technologies. Psychological customization may be considered an operationalization and technique of implementing the concept of mind-based technologies in system design. Psychological customization may be used for controlling social interaction-centric and individual-centric influence of the content and way of presentation of information on consequent and transient emotional and cognitive effects. This paper explores the design space and presents a basic system architecture to implement psychological customization.