Emotional aspects in Interactive systems

This special issue invites researchers from different areas to discuss practices, challenges, and opportunities regarding identification, interpreting, evaluating, and using emotions in interactive systems for diverse purposes.

Authors are invited to submit original manuscripts that address challenges in any of the following areas:
● Design of interactive systems considering emotions;
● Emotions in User Experience;
● Affective computing;
● Hedonic quality;
● Emotion recognition using sensors, cameras, or different devices;
● Datasets for emotion recognition or emotional data repositories;
● Proposal or results from using instruments to evaluate emotions;
● Sentiment analysis;
● Privacy and ethical considerations in studies involving emotion in interactive systems;
● Emotional aspects in player experience;
● Software adaptation or recommendations based on human emotions;
● Decision-making in interactive systems based on emotions;
● Emotions in robotics: recognizing or responding to human emotions.

Authors are encouraged to explore, but are not limited to, the relationship between "Emotional aspects in interactive systems" and the Grand Research Challenges for Human-Computer Interaction (GranDIHC-BR), organized by the Brazilian Human-Computer Interaction community in 2024. Multidisciplinary research that embraces different areas of knowledge is also of interest to this special issue.

Paper submission
Authors are invited to submit papers by 30 Oct 2025. Submissions should be original and should not be under consideration for publication in another journal or conference while being evaluated for this special issue.

If the paper consists of an extended version of a previously published conference paper, authors need to ensure that the paper is a non-trivial extension of the original paper. Authors also must ensure that the extended paper contains at least 40% new material (more is expected) compared to the previously published work.

Submissions must follow the journal's guidelines for authors. Authors must read and follow these instructions carefully when preparing their manuscripts. We strongly recommend reading the journal's editorial workflow and guidelines for reviewers.

Schedule and plan
The selection process will be a single-anonymous peer-review system. Submitted manuscripts will be reviewed by three independent experts. Submissions that do not meet the journal requirements and fail to adhere to the submission checklist will be desk-rejected.

Important Dates
● Submission Deadline: 06 Nov 2025
● Notification Deadline - 1st round: 19 Jan 2026
● Submission Deadline - 2nd round: 18 Feb 2026
● Decision Deadline - 2nd round: 14 Apr 2026
● Camera-ready submission deadline: 04 May 2026
● Ultimate deadline for publication: Jun/Jul 2026

Papers rejected in the first round will be notified on 19 Jan 2026. Papers invited for the second round will receive a final decision on 14 Apr 2026.

If you have any doubts, please contact the Special Issue Editors: vania.neris@ufscar.br and renan.aranha@ufmt.br

Special Issue Editors

Renan Vinicius Aranha has been investigating emotional aspects in human-computer interaction since his master's and PhD research, which explored the automatic adaptation of games according to players' emotions and personality. His current research investigates approaches to compare the emotional responses of different individuals to the same stimulus. Renan co-organized two editions of the Workshop on Aspects of Human-Computer Interaction for the Social Web and acted as proceedings chair in three editions of the Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems. He has worked as a reviewer for the Journal of Interactive Systems (JIS), Multimedia Tools and Applications (MTAP), and IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing (TAFFC).

Vânia Paula de Almeida Neris has been investigating human-computer interaction since 1999 and focusing on emotional studies since 2010. She has several papers published on emotional studies and gave a keynote speech titled "Sensor-supported interaction for mental health and well-being," covering emotional aspects at the Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems (IHC 2023). She co-presented a tutorial titled "Sensing Affective States through Wearable Devices" at the 9th International Conference on Affective Computing & Intelligent Interaction (ACII 2021), sponsored by IEEE. She has been co-charing several events and tracks in human-computer interaction events as the Research Track in the Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems (IHC 2024) and the Mini Courses Track in the Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems (IHC 2023) which results were published in a book available at the SOL - SBC. She has been Associate Chair for the ACM SIGCHI Conference in Human-Computer Interaction (CHI) in 2024 and 2022. She was a Coordinator editor for the Journal of Information Systems Frontier, from Springer Nature. She has been reviewing papers in the area for journals such as JIS, Journal of the Brazilian Computer Society (JBCS), Brazilian Journal of Information Systems (iSys), Interacting with Computers, Complex & Intelligent Systems, and Journal of Medical Internet Research.