Challenges of Designing HCI for Negative Emotions

Amit Zoran; Jodi Forlizzi; Michal Luria

Challenges of Designing HCI for Negative Emotions

T0 review · 0 major / 5 minor · reviewed 2026-08-14 · deepseek-v4-flash

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Pith's one-line read This paper argues that HCI should intentionally design for negative emotions like anger and sadness, and that the main obstacle is doing so without harming users—which currently steers evaluation toward auto-ethnography.

desk verdict A small, honest workshop paper that usefully frames designing for negative emotions in HCI as a two-challenge problem, with prototypes that illustrate but don't validate the space. read the letter →

arxiv 1908.07577 v1 pith:YABBBFXU submitted 2019-08-20 cs.HC

Michal Luria , Amit Zoran , Jodi Forlizzi This is my paper · ORCID

classification cs.HC

keywords HCInegativeemotionsaffectcatharsiscatharticobjectsdesignforemotionautoethnographyethicsofevaluation

verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal

The pith

A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.

The reading

This paper tries to establish that HCI has an underexplored, valuable design space: technology that helps people engage with negative emotions such as anger, sadness, and frustration rather than avoiding or immediately resolving them. It draws on psychology to argue that correctly interacting with negative affect can benefit well-being, which makes the space worth opening despite the delicate boundary between helpful and harmful designs. The paper names two obstacles—designing appropriate prototypes for a chosen negative emotion, and evaluating those prototypes when the interaction itself is meant to surface negative emotion—and illustrates both through four Cathartic Objects that support poking, cursing, hitting, and destroying a personalized tile. Its conclusion is that designers can responsibly ground such prototypes in literature and judgment, but that evaluation may currently be limited to auto-ethnography, because human-subject studies would require participants to experience negative emotions.

What carries the argument

The conceptual machinery is the pairing of two design challenges—building prototypes for a negative emotion and evaluating them under a 'do no harm' constraint—with a concrete demonstration in four Cathartic Objects. Each object is a prototype for a distinct cathartic style: receiving pokes and shaking until the pain is absorbed, absorbing curse words and re-emitting them as light, provoking and absorbing physical hits, and letting the user inscribe a personalized tile and destroy it inside the artifact. These objects carry the argument because they translate the abstract ethical boundary into observable design choices about absorption, completion, and contained destruction, and they motivate the claim that the only currently safe evaluation method is a researcher's own extended auto-ethnography.

What would settle it

A controlled study in which angry participants use one of the Cathartic Objects and then report equal or higher anger, anxiety, or aggressive intent than a control group that did not use it would falsify the claim that the objects support catharsis without harm.

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Extended reading notes

Core claim

The paper's central claim is that HCI's near-exclusive focus on positive emotions is a missed opportunity: because technology is increasingly social and personal, it should also support negative emotional states, and psychological research indicates that constructively engaging these states can improve mental health and relationships. It frames this as a design problem with two named challenges: selecting a negative emotion and creating appropriate prototypes, and engaging participants in interactions intended to surface that emotion. The four Cathartic Objects serve as a case study showing that design can proceed from theory plus designer judgment, while the second challenge exposes the ethical question at the heart of the paper—can researchers explore this design space while making sure they do not cause harm? The paper proposes that responsible design currently stops at auto-ethnography, because standard evaluation would force participants into negative emotional states without promised benefit.

Load-bearing premise

The argument depends on the assumption that a single researcher's auto-ethnographic engagement with the prototypes can stand in for user evaluation, and more fundamentally that the objects do not harm even though they were never pilot-tested with participants.

Editorial extensions

If this is right

Negative affect becomes a legitimate design material in HCI, so future systems can intentionally invite anger, sadness, or frustration instead of only suppressing or resolving them.
Designers can build prototypes from psychological theory and their own judgment even when pilot testing is ethically blocked, making literature review a load-bearing part of the design process.
Standard usability evaluation will often be inappropriate for this design space, and auto-ethnography becomes a defensible first-line method for sensitive emotional interactions.
The boundary between helpful and harmful catharsis becomes an explicit design parameter, forcing designers to specify how an artifact signals absorption, completion, and contained destruction.
As conversational agents and robots mediate personal relationships, they will need to handle users' negative emotions, making this design space increasingly relevant to mainstream HCI.

Reading between the lines

Editorial extensions of the paper, not claims the author makes directly.

I infer that the two-challenge framing can be read as a research agenda: a natural next step is a taxonomy of negative emotions by severity and risk, so designers can calibrate how far a prototype can go before crossing into harm.
I infer that auto-ethnography could be made more robust by involving several researchers, structured diaries, and physiological logging, yielding triangulated evidence without exposing participants to negative affect.
I infer that the Cathartic Objects could be tested against alternative emotion-regulation strategies, such as distraction or reappraisal, in a randomized comparison to see whether designed venting actually outperforms not engaging.
The 'causing no harm' standard, as the paper treats it, focuses on immediate distress during interaction; I infer it should be widened to delayed effects such as rumination or increased aggression, which the paper does not address.

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Editorial analysis

A structured set of objections, weighed in public.

Desk editor's note, referee report, and a circularity audit.

Desk Editor's Note

read the letter

Short version: this is a modest but genuine workshop paper. Its contribution is a two-challenge framing for designing HCI that embraces negative emotions—selecting and designing for a negative emotion, and evaluating it without harming participants—plus four Cathartic Objects prototypes that illustrate the framing. The authors are appropriately honest that the prototypes are not user-evaluated and that the planned auto-ethnographic study is a compromise. The central claim, that negative affect is an underserved design space with real ethical obstacles, is supported by the literature they cite and by the case study.

What I like: the paper doesn't overclaim. The conclusion is explicitly tentative—designers 'might be able to rely on literature and on their own judgment'—and the evaluation trap is stated plainly. The prototypes are varied (verbal, physical, reflective) and the design rationale in Section 3.1 is sensible. The paper also does a good job situating the work against psychology's 'positive side of negative emotions' and against cultural examples like Wabi-Sabi.

Soft spots, in proportion: the biggest is Section 3.2. A single researcher's auto-ethnography cannot establish that these objects are safe or beneficial for a broader population, and it doesn't test the delicate boundary between helpful and harmful that the paper itself identifies. The authors acknowledge this, saying it 'may not be ideal' and calling it 'the safest way' given the topic. That is transparent, but it means the case study only illustrates the challenges; it doesn't demonstrate a responsible design solution. The final suggestion that designers can rely on literature and judgment is plausible but under-supported by the presented evidence. For a workshop paper this is acceptable. For an archival paper, they'd need at least a small pilot with careful IRB processes or a more robust auto-ethnographic method (e.g., multiple researchers, structured diaries).

Another minor point: the paper doesn't engage with the possibility that some negative emotions (e.g., sadness) may be easier to surface safely than anger, which could complicate the 'two challenges' framing. But this is a workshop-level scope issue.

Overall: the math/data angle isn't relevant here; the citation pattern looks fine and there is no circularity. This is a good, honest paper that deserves to be seen by a serious referee in the design/HCI space, though I'd expect revision toward more careful claims about evaluation. I'd bring it to a reading group maybe, and I'd cite it if I were writing about affective interaction design.

Recommendation: engage with it; accept with minor comments if the venue allows workshop-style position papers.

Referee Report

0 major / 5 minor

Summary. Negative emotions are often excluded from HCI design, which typically emphasizes positive affect. This workshop paper scopes the design space of interactions that embrace negative emotions, identifies two challenges (designing for negative affect and evaluating such designs without harm), and presents the Cathartic Objects prototypes as a case study. The authors argue that while design can be informed by psychological literature and designer judgment, evaluation is constrained by ethical and institutional review concerns, and they propose auto-ethnography as the presently feasible evaluation method, openly acknowledging its limitations.

Significance. If the position holds, the paper makes a useful contribution by naming an underexplored design space and its associated challenges in a concise, honest manner. The paper's main strengths are its transparency (no user evaluation is claimed, the absence of pilot testing is stated, and the auto-ethnography is called 'not ideal') and its careful hedging of the conclusion. The weakest assumption, that a single researcher's auto-ethnography can meaningfully explore cathartic interactions, is explicitly flagged by the authors and does not undercut the paper's scoped claim that this design space exists and presents distinct ethical challenges. Because the paper makes no quantitative claims and does not overgeneralize, no load-bearing technical error is present.

minor comments (5)

[2.2] The claim that IRB approval for negative-emotion research is 'unlikely' is presented without evidence; citing institutional guidelines or documented examples would make the challenge more concrete.
[3.2] The paper would be stronger if it briefly explained why alternative evaluation methodologies, such as expert evaluation or role-based testing, were set aside in favor of auto-ethnography, since the latter's limitations are acknowledged.
[1] The statement that 'not much work in HCI has looked into the role of these emotions' would benefit from a short orienting citation or a brief discussion of prior affect-related HCI work to substantiate the gap.
[3.1] The description of the iterative design process would be clearer if the authors explicitly connected the diversity of the four objects (verbal, forceful, gentle, reflective) to the design challenge stated in Section 2.1.
[References] Reference [8] supports retaliation as a fairness-restoring behavior rather than catharsis directly; one sentence clarifying how that study supports 'venting' would improve the argument.

Circularity Check

0 steps flagged · score 0.0 of 10

No circularity: the paper is a scoped position/case-study argument with no fitted inputs, no self-citation chain, and no derivation that reduces to its own assumptions.

full rationale

This is a workshop position paper, not a derivation or empirical prediction. Section 2 frames two design challenges for negative affect, and Section 3 applies those challenges to Cathartic Objects as an illustrative case study. The central claim is that the design space is underserved and that responsible design and harm-free evaluation are the main obstacles; that claim is supported by external psychology references and by the authors' own design process, not by any quantity fitted from the same data. Section 3.2 explicitly discloses that evaluation is limited to auto-ethnography and that this method 'may not be ideal'; this is a transparent limitation, not a circular step, because the paper does not use the auto-ethnography as validation of a derived conclusion. The conclusion is appropriately tentative ('designers might be able to rely on literature and on their own judgment'), and no equation, fitted parameter, or self-citation is load-bearing. Therefore there is no significant circularity.

Assumptions & free parameters 0 free parameters · 3 assumptions · 0 invented entities

The paper relies on three main domain assumptions: the psychological benefit of engaging with negative emotions, the sufficiency of designer judgment when pilots are infeasible, and the adequacy of auto-ethnography for evaluation. There are no fitted parameters or invented theoretical entities; the Cathartic Objects are physical design artifacts rather than postulated explanatory entities.

assumptions (3)

domain assumption Interacting with negative emotions in the right way can benefit well-being.
The paper cites psychology literature [11], and the entire value of the design space depends on this premise, but it is not tested in this paper.
domain assumption Designers can responsibly create prototypes for negative affect using literature and their own judgment rather than pilot testing.
Section 3.1 states the iterative design process was not informed by pilots but constrained to the authors' own experiences, a choice used to justify the four prototypes.
domain assumption Auto-ethnography is an acceptable method for evaluating emotionally sensitive designs.
Section 3.2 proposes auto-ethnography because standard human-subject studies are blocked by IRB concerns; the paper does not validate this method against other approaches.

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Cite this review

Pith. "Pith review of Challenges of Designing HCI for Negative Emotions." pith.science (2026). https://pith.science/paper/YABBBFXU

@misc{pith2026190807577,
  author       = {Pith},
  title        = {Pith review of: Challenges of Designing HCI for Negative Emotions},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://pith.science/paper/YABBBFXU}},
  note         = {Machine review of arXiv:1908.07577}
}

read the original abstract

Emotions that are perceived as "negative" are inherent in the human experience. Yet not much work in the field of HCI has looked into the role of these emotions in interaction with technology. As technology is becoming more social, personal and emotional by mediating our relationships and generating new social entities (such as conversational agents and robots), it is valuable to consider how it can support people's negative emotions and behaviors. Research in Psychology shows that interacting with negative emotions correctly can benefit well-being, yet the boundary between helpful and harmful is delicate. This workshop paper looks at the opportunities of designing for negative affect, and the challenge of "causing no harm" that arises in an attempt to do so.

Figures

Figures reproduced from arXiv: 1908.07577 by the authors.

**Figure 1.** Cathartic Objects. Four objects that were designed for interactive expression of negative emotion through slow, reflective, forceful or verbal cathartic interactions. be enough to evoke the concern of academic institutional review boards. It is not very common for HCI researchers to promote negative emotions, and therefore it is unlikely to be approved for human-subject research. Even if approved, the researcher ri… view at source ↗

Discussion (0). Continue with ORCID to comment.

Reference graph

Works this paper leans on

12 extracted references · 12 canonical work pages

[1]

Joseph Breuer and Sigmund Freud. 2009. Studies on hysteria. Hachette UK

work page 2009
[2]

Barry Bryant. 2003. The wheel of time sand mandala: Visual scripture of Tibetan Buddhism. Shambhala

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[3]

YE Chentsova-Dutton, N Senft, and AG Ryder. 2014. Listening to negative emotions: How culture constrains what we hear. The positive side of negative emotions. New York: Guilford Press. Google Scholar (2014)

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[4]

William Gaver. 2012. What should we expect from research through design?. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems . ACM, 937–946

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[5]

NE Henniger and CR Harris. 2014. Can negative social emotions have positive consequences? An examination of embarrassment, shame, guilt, jealousy, and envy. The positive side of negative emotions (2014), 76–97

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[6]

Ursula Hess. 2014. Anger is a positive emotion . New York: Guilford Press

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[7]

Andrew Juniper. 2011. Wabi sabi: The Japanese art of impermanence . Tuttle Publishing

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[8]

Lindie H Liang, Douglas J Brown, Huiwen Lian, Samuel Hanig, D Lance Ferris, and Lisa M Keeping. 2018. Righting a wrong: Retaliation on a voodoo doll symbolizing an abusive supervisor restores justice. The Leadership Quarterly (2018)

work page 2018

Show all 12 references

[9]

Darrin M McMahon. 2006. Happiness: A history. Grove Press

2006
[10]

Aisling Ann O’Kane, Yvonne Rogers, and Ann E Blandford. 2014. Gaining empa- thy for non-routine mobile device use through autoethnography. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 987–990

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W Gerrod Parrott. 2014. The positive side of negative emotions . Guilford Publica- tions

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Richard Stephens, John Atkins, and Andrew Kingston. 2009. Swearing as a response to pain. Neuroreport 20, 12 (2009), 1056–1060

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Pith tools

Reviewed August 14, 2026 · model on record in the stance chip above.

[1] [1]

Joseph Breuer and Sigmund Freud. 2009. Studies on hysteria. Hachette UK

work page 2009

[2] [2]

Barry Bryant. 2003. The wheel of time sand mandala: Visual scripture of Tibetan Buddhism. Shambhala

work page 2003

[3] [3]

YE Chentsova-Dutton, N Senft, and AG Ryder. 2014. Listening to negative emotions: How culture constrains what we hear. The positive side of negative emotions. New York: Guilford Press. Google Scholar (2014)

work page 2014

[4] [4]

William Gaver. 2012. What should we expect from research through design?. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems . ACM, 937–946

work page 2012

[5] [5]

NE Henniger and CR Harris. 2014. Can negative social emotions have positive consequences? An examination of embarrassment, shame, guilt, jealousy, and envy. The positive side of negative emotions (2014), 76–97

work page 2014

[6] [6]

Ursula Hess. 2014. Anger is a positive emotion . New York: Guilford Press

work page 2014

[7] [7]

Andrew Juniper. 2011. Wabi sabi: The Japanese art of impermanence . Tuttle Publishing

work page 2011

[8] [8]

Lindie H Liang, Douglas J Brown, Huiwen Lian, Samuel Hanig, D Lance Ferris, and Lisa M Keeping. 2018. Righting a wrong: Retaliation on a voodoo doll symbolizing an abusive supervisor restores justice. The Leadership Quarterly (2018)

work page 2018