There are a host of interesting books about psychology, design, emotion, and how our brains work that informed my book, Designing for Emotion. Here’s a list of essential books for the shelves of any user experience designer, web designer, or content strategist interested in the topic of emotional design.
A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers Will Rule The Future
David H. Pink

The future belongs to a different kind of person with a different kind of mind: artists, inventors, storytellers-creative and holistic “right-brain” thinkers whose abilities mark the fault line between who gets ahead and who doesn’t.
Drawing on research from around the world, Pink outlines the six fundamentally human abilities that are absolute essentials for professional success and personal fulfillment-and reveals how to master them. A Whole New Mind takes readers to a daring new place, and a provocative and necessary new way of thinking about a future that’s already here.
Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things
Donald Norman

Did you ever wonder why cheap wine tastes better in fancy glasses? Why sales of Macintosh computers soared when Apple introduced the colorful iMac? New research on emotion and cognition has shown that attractive things really do work better, as Donald Norman amply demonstrates in this fascinating book, which has garnered acclaim everywhere from Scientific American to The New Yorker.Emotional Design articulates the profound influence of the feelings that objects evoke, from our willingness to spend thousands of dollars on Gucci bags and Rolex watches, to the impact of emotion on the everyday objects of tomorrow.Norman draws on a wealth of examples and the latest scientific insights to present a bold exploration of the objects in our everyday world. Emotional Design will appeal not only to designers and manufacturers but also to managers, psychologists, and general readers who love to think about their stuff.
Seductive Interaction Design: Creating Playful, Fun, and Effective User Experiences
Stephen Anderson

What happens when you’ve built a great website or app, but no one seems to care? How do you get people to stick around long enough to see how your service might be of value? In Seductive Interaction Design, speaker and author Stephen P. Anderson takes a fresh approach to designing sites and interactions based on the stages of seduction. This beautifully designed book examines what motivates people to act.
A General Theory of Love
Thomas Lewis M.D., Fari Amini M.D., Richard Lannon M.D.

Drawing comparisons to the most eloquent science writing of our day, three eminent psychiatrists tackle the difficult task of reconciling what artists and thinkers have known for thousands of years about the human heart with what has only recently been learned about the primitive functions of the human brain. The result is an original, lucid, at times moving account of the complexities of love and its essential role in human well-being.
A General Theory of Love draws on the latest scientific research to demonstrate that our nervous systems are not self-contained: from earliest childhood, our brains actually link with those of the people close to us, in a silent rhythm that alters the very structure of our brains, establishes life-long emotional patterns, and makes us, in large part, who we are. Explaining how relationships function, how parents shape their child’s developing self, how psychotherapy really works, and how our society dangerously flouts essential emotional laws, this is a work of rare passion and eloquence that will forever change the way you think about human intimacy.
Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain
Antonio Damasio

Since Descartes famously proclaimed, “I think, therefore I am,” science has often overlooked emotions as the source of a person’s true being. Even modern neuroscience has tended, until recently, to concentrate on the cognitive aspects of brain function, disregarding emotions. This attitude began to change with the publication of Descartes’ Error in 1995. Antonio Damasio—”one of the world’s leading neurologists” (The New York Times)—challenged traditional ideas about the connection between emotions and rationality. In this wondrously engaging book, Damasio takes the reader on a journey of scientific discovery through a series of case studies, demonstrating what many of us have long suspected: emotions are not a luxury, they are essential to rational thinking and to normal social behavior.
The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness
Antonio Damasio

How is it that we know what we know? How is it that our conscious and private minds have a sense of self? A gifted medical clinician and scientific thinker, Damasio helps readers to ask and answer questions about what it is to be human. His elegant investigation of feeling and emotion offers a new understanding of the conscious mind and, as the New York Times has noted, “will change your experience of yourself.”
Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain
Antonio Damasio

Joy, sorrow, jealousy, and awe—these and other feelings are the stuff of our daily lives. In the seventeenth century, the philosopher Spinoza devoted much of his life’s work examining how these emotions supported human survival, yet hundreds of years later the biological roots of what we feel remain a mystery. Leading neuroscientist Antonio Damasio—whose earlier books explore rational behavior and the notion of the self—rediscovers a man whose work ran counter to all the thinking of his day, pairing Spinoza’s insights with his own innovative scientific research to help us understand what we’re made of, and what we’re here for.
How The Mind Works
Steven Pinker

The Pulitzer Prize finalist and national bestseller How the Mind Works is a fascinating, provocative work exploring the mysteries of human thought and behavior. How do we see in three dimensions? How do we remember names and faces? How is it, indeed, that we ponder the nature of our own consciousness? Why do we fall in love? In this bold, extraordinary book, Pinker synthesizes the best of cognitive science and evolutionary biology to explain what the mind is, how it has evolved, and, ultimately, how it works. This edition includes a new afterword that explores the impact of the book and its relevance today.
Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School
John Medina

See how the brain works while using it in the process of reading this book! Most of us have no idea what’s really going on inside our heads. Yet brain scientists have uncovered details every business leader, parent, and teacher should know – like that physical activity boosts your brain power.
How do we learn? What exactly do sleep and stress do to our brains? Why is multi-tasking a myth? Why is it so easy to forget – and so important to repeat new information? Is it true that men and women have different brains?
In Brain Rules, Dr. John Medina, a molecular biologist, shares his lifelong interest in how the brain sciences might influence the way we teach our children and the way we work. In each chapter, he describes a brain rule – what scientists know for sure about how our brains work – and then offers transformative ideas for our daily lives.
The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals
Charles Darwin

Published in 1871, this book explores the universality of emotional expression in humans regardless of culture, and even in animals.
Darwin’s Camera: Art and Photography in the Theory of Evolution
Phillip Prodger

Darwin’s Camera tells the extraordinary story of how Charles Darwin changed the way pictures are seen and made.
In his illustrated masterpiece, Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1871), Darwin introduced the idea of using photographs to illustrate a scientific theory–his was the first photographically illustrated science book ever published. Using photographs to depict fleeting expressions of emotion–laughter, crying, anger, and so on–as they flit across a person’s face, he managed to produce dramatic images at a time when photography was famously slow and awkward. The book describes how Darwin struggled to get the pictures he needed, scouring the galleries, bookshops, and photographic studios of London, looking for pictures to satisfy his demand for expressive imagery. He finally settled on one the giants of photographic history, the eccentric art photographer Oscar Rejlander, to make his pictures. It was a peculiar choice. Darwin was known for his meticulous science, while Rejlander was notorious for altering and manipulating photographs. Their remarkable collaboration is one of the astonishing revelations in Darwin’s Camera.
Darwin never studied art formally, but he was always interested in art and often drew on art knowledge as his work unfolded. He mingled with the artists on the voyage of HMS Beagle, he visited art museums to examine figures and animals in paintings, associated with artists, and read art history books. He befriended the celebrated animal painters Joseph Wolf and Briton Riviere, and accepted the Pre-Raphaelite sculptor Thomas Woolner as a trusted guide. He corresponded with legendary photographers Lewis Carroll, Julia Margaret Cameron, and G.-B. Duchenne de Boulogne, as well as many lesser lights. Darwin’s Camera provides the first examination ever of these relationships and their effect on Darwin’s work, and how Darwin, in turn, shaped the history of art.
And of course, there’s this little book too.
Designing for Emotion
Aarron Walter

Make your users fall in love with your site via the precepts packed into this brief, charming book by MailChimp user experience design lead Aarron Walter. From classic psychology to case studies, highbrow concepts to common sense, Designing for Emotion demonstrates accessible strategies and memorable methods to help you make a human connection through design.
tagged: Books, content-strategy, emotion, emotional-design, psychology, ux, web design
@aarron awesome! Will be ordering some books soon :) Thanks for putting it together.
Just what I’ve been looking for, seriously!! RT @aarron: Blog Post: An Emotional Design Reading List http://t.co/3vTyNfny
Thanks! RT @aarron: Blog Post: An Emotional Design Reading List http://t.co/8xDwR6jS
@aarron An Emotional Design Reading List http://t.co/MUH58Skc Hmm I wonder how/if #emotionaldesign relates to my client @ShankmanEIL’s work
An Emotional Design Reading List http://t.co/FBUT74HM /via @aarron #design #emotion
Sweet, time to get emotional: Emotional Design Reading List | Aarron Walter http://t.co/ciUTLzmS via @aarron
Emotional Design Reading List: http://t.co/hXqfkygE /via @aarron
good "Emotional Design Reading List" from @aarron http://t.co/EXqptQNo
Interessante boeken, ook wat minder bekende @stephenanderson: good Emotional Design Reading List from @aarron http://t.co/Rpu3QmfL
stephenanderson: good "Emotional Design Reading List" from @aarron http://t.co/2IqPfcoF: stephenanderson: good… http://t.co/JS6j7S9a
Emotional Design Reading List http://t.co/XmM58T8W
‘Emotional Design’ reading list. For those who haven’t got yet that design has been always emotional http://t.co/owAUJjCA
Be sure to check out @aarron’s Emotional Design Reading List: http://t.co/cQ8qm5rg
Nice additions to my wish list :)
http://t.co/MTQEvTGm
#emotionaldesign
Awesome list – will definitely check some of them out. I particularly like the look of Seductive Interactive Design.
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Lista de leitura sobre "design emocional" http://t.co/zea2xwqW #design
Emotional Design Reading List | Aarron Walter http://t.co/3rkenppp via @aarron
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Emotional design reading list, by @aarron http://t.co/k43IDLWJ #emotionaldesign
[...] Flash – Professor Walters has compiled an Emotional Design Reading List that includes the two books above and several more which look [...]
Great initiative. Will start with your book Designing for Emotion.
May I suggest another? The Eyes of The Skin, famous two essays written by Juhani Pallasmaa, an architect from Helsinki.
I’ve bought stacks of this little book. One of the most appreciated gifts I ever handed out to designers and to those for whom design with emotion leads to humane design.