Inducing emotional response in interactive media: A pilot study

Abstract

Video games, entertainment, education, and training media have been developed for many years, and eliciting emotional experiences is an integral part of that process. Production and editing of the media in order to produce the desired emotional experiences can be expensive and cumbersome to media designers. This paper presents a pilot study intended to show that such experiences can be induced with after-the-fact audio-visual effects. As subjects of the user study, players are given the same virtual environment with two emotional states: fear, and peace. Over 70 % of players report feeling the proper emotional response in both environmental states, revealing that it is indeed possible to induce emotional response with after-the-fact audio-visual effects, hinting at future possibilities for drag-and-drop emotional experience filters.