iScale: Studying Long-Term Experiences through Memory - Modeling Users' Experiences with Interactive Systems - page 88

of recalled contextual cues. They propose an accessibility model that distinguishes
between four types of knowledge used to (re)construct an emotion. First, experien-
tial knowledge is used when an emotion is constructed “online” (i.e. as the experi-
ence takes place). When experiential knowledge is inaccessible, people will resort to
episodic information : they will recall contextual cues from episodic memory to re-
construct the emotional experience. When episodic memories become inaccessible,
people will shift to semantic memory. They first access situation-specific beliefs :
beliefs “about the emotions that are likely to be elicited in a particular type of situa-
tion” (p. 935). If event-specific beliefs are inaccessible as well (e.g., due to rarity of
the event) people will access identity-related beliefs : “beliefs about their emotions
in general” (p. 935).
Motivated by the accessibility model of Robinson and Clore (2002), Daniel Kah-
neman and colleagues (2004; 2008) developed the Day Reconstruction Method
(DRM), an online diary method that attempts to minimize retrospection biases when
recalling emotional experiences. DRM starts by asking participants to mentally re-
construct their daily experiences as a continuous series of episodes, writing a brief
name for each one. This aims at eliciting contextual cues within each experiential
episode as well as temporal relations between episodes. As a result, participants re-
construct the emotional experience on the basis of a more complete set of episodic
information, thereby minimizing bias from overly relying on semantic information,
which is detached from the actual experience.

5.2.2 The Value-Account Approach

The value-account approach assumes that people recall an overall emotional assess-
ment of an experience, but not the exact details of the experienced event. Betsch
et al. (2001) proposed the existence of a memory structure called value-account ,
which stores the frequency and intensity of positive or negative responses to stimuli.
Since Value-Account is more accessible and better retained over time than details
from episodic memory, it will actually cue episodic information, when reconstruct-
ing an experience, or feeds into a potential overall evaluation even in the absence
of any episodic information (Koriat et al., 2000; Neisser, 1981). This top-down pro-
cess for reconstructing memories is consistent with research on autobiographical
memory, where three levels are distinguished: lifetime periods, general events, and
event-specific knowledge. Reconstruction takes place in a top-down fashion where
knowledge stored at the level of a lifetime period cues information at the two lower
levels (Conway and Pleydell-Pearce, 2000).
Both approaches, constructive and value-account, suggest specific processes for
retrieving emotional experiences from memory. While the constructive approach as-
sumes a bottom-up, chronological recall of episodic information that cues the recon-
struction of experienced affect and emotion, the value-account approach suggests a
top-down process, starting from affect stored in specific value-accounts to cue the
recall of specific episodic information. In the following section, we will illustrate
how these two processes were operationalized in two separate versions of the iScale
tool.