A Proposal of Mathematical Approach to Formulate Emotional Desensitization to Novelty

抄録

Novelty is an important factor of creativity in product design. Acceptance of novelty, however, depends on one’s emotions. Raymond Loewy, a pioneer of industrial design, defined a broader term between attraction of novelty and fear of the unknown MAYA (Most advanced, yet acceptable), which is important for new designs that are widely accepted in society. Yanagisawa et al. (2019) developed a mathematical model of emotion dimensions associated with novelty such as arousal (surprise) and valence (positivity and negativity). The model formalized arousal as Bayesian information gain and valence as a function of arousal based on Berlyne’s arousal potential theory. On the one hand, people get used to novelty by repeated exposure. This so-called desensitization to novelty is an important factor to consider in the design of long-term products experience. In this paper, we proposed a mathematical model of desensitization to novelty based on the emotion dimension model. We formalized the desensitization as a decrement of information gained from a novel event through Bayesian update. We derived the information gained from repeated exposure of a novel stimulus as a function of three parameters: initial prediction error, initial uncertainty and noise of sensory stimulus. With the proposed model, we found an interaction effect of initial prediction error and initial uncertainty on desensitization (decrement of information gain). Furthermore, we demonstrated that a range of positive emotions on prediction errors shifted towards more novel by repeated novelty exposure. The experimental results of previous studies supported this simulation results.