Historically, a lot of work on tools for thought has either ignored emotion, or treated it as no more than a secondary concern. Instead, that work has focused on new skills acquired, on what the user “learns”. They’ve been designing for Spock, when emotional connection is a high-order bit. Do users feel disinterested? Afraid? Hostile? Anxious? Or do they internalize a sense of excitement, of beauty, perhaps even an expansion in their own goals, an expansion of their self?
By contrast, media forms such as movies and music and (often) video games do take emotion seriously. The designers of such forms often have incredibly elaborate models of user’s emotional responses.