Exploring the impact of emotion on visual judgement

Existing research suggests that individual personality differences can influence performance with visualizations. In addition to stable traits such as locus of control, research in psychology has found that temporary changes in affect (emotion) can significantly impact individual performance on cognitive tasks. We examine the relationship between fundamental visual judgement tasks and affect through a crowdsourced user study that combines affective-priming techniques from psychology with longstanding graphical perception experiments. Our results suggest that affective-priming can significantly influence accuracy in visual judgements, and that some chart types may be more affected than others.