Affective Congruency

The degree to which a system's sensory outputs, interactions, and feedback align emotionally with the user's current affective state and the emotional meaning the user attaches to the experience. Distinct from perceptual congruency, affective congruency concerns whether the emotion conveyed across modalities (e.g., the feeling evoked by a color plus a sound plus a motion) coheres into a single emotional message. Affective congruency is a core design principle in affective computing and is especially important for older adults, whose age-related sensory decline and social isolation can make incongruent affective cues harder to interpret.