Influence of prior and task generated emotions on XAI explanation retention and understanding

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Richter, Birte, Schütze, Christian, Aksonova, Anna, Wrede, Britta
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866910959413493760
author Richter, Birte
Schütze, Christian
Aksonova, Anna
Wrede, Britta
author_facet Richter, Birte
Schütze, Christian
Aksonova, Anna
Wrede, Britta
contents The explanation of AI results and how they are received by users is an increasingly active research field. However, there is a surprising lack of knowledge about how social factors such as emotions affect the process of explanation by a decision support system (DSS). While previous research has shown effects of emotions on DSS supported decision-making, it remains unknown in how far emotions affect cognitive processing during an explanation. In this study, we, therefore, investigated the influence of prior emotions and task-related arousal on the retention and understanding of explained feature relevance. To investigate the influence of prior emotions, we induced happiness and fear prior to the decision support interaction. Before emotion induction, user characteristics to assess their risk type were collected via a questionnaire. To identify emotional reactions to the explanations of the relevance of different features, we observed heart rate variability (HRV), facial expressions, and self-reported emotions of the explainee while observing and listening to the explanation and assessed their retention of the features as well as their influence on the outcome of the decision task. Results indicate that (1) task-unrelated prior emotions do not affected the ratantion but may affect the understanding of the relevance of certain features in the sense of an emotion-induced confirmation bias, (2) certain features related to personal attitudes yielded arousal in individual participants, (3) this arousal affected the understanding of these variables.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_10427
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Influence of prior and task generated emotions on XAI explanation retention and understanding
Richter, Birte
Schütze, Christian
Aksonova, Anna
Wrede, Britta
Human-Computer Interaction
The explanation of AI results and how they are received by users is an increasingly active research field. However, there is a surprising lack of knowledge about how social factors such as emotions affect the process of explanation by a decision support system (DSS). While previous research has shown effects of emotions on DSS supported decision-making, it remains unknown in how far emotions affect cognitive processing during an explanation. In this study, we, therefore, investigated the influence of prior emotions and task-related arousal on the retention and understanding of explained feature relevance. To investigate the influence of prior emotions, we induced happiness and fear prior to the decision support interaction. Before emotion induction, user characteristics to assess their risk type were collected via a questionnaire. To identify emotional reactions to the explanations of the relevance of different features, we observed heart rate variability (HRV), facial expressions, and self-reported emotions of the explainee while observing and listening to the explanation and assessed their retention of the features as well as their influence on the outcome of the decision task. Results indicate that (1) task-unrelated prior emotions do not affected the ratantion but may affect the understanding of the relevance of certain features in the sense of an emotion-induced confirmation bias, (2) certain features related to personal attitudes yielded arousal in individual participants, (3) this arousal affected the understanding of these variables.
title Influence of prior and task generated emotions on XAI explanation retention and understanding
topic Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.10427