Emotional Response Increments Induced by Equivalent Enhancement of Different Valence Films

Abstract

The arrangements of emotional intensity in film which related to the plot and rhythm are important to the audience's feeling of the film. The arousal degree brought by different emotional intensity is the core concern of the film creators. Whether the equal enhancement of positive and negative emotion stimulus will bring equal emotion arousal to audiences has not been determined in current researches. Previous studies usually just simple compare positive and negative films, but the emotional intensity of positive and negative films is already different, so it is difficult to compare them accurately. In this paper, participants were asked to watch one of the formats of Virtual Reality (VR) and 2D (Monoscopic) emotional films, and to compare the arousal increments of participants under the condition of equivalent enhancement of positive and negative valence films. The experiment results show that the same incremental negative films bring more incremental responses than the positive ones. Combined with subjective scales, skin conductivity response and pulse rate can better reflect the physiological indicators of emotional arousal. In addition, in both positive and negative films, skin conductance level, skin conductance response, blood volume pulse and subjective evaluation showed significant differences between VR and 2D, and the valence judgment of negative films was not affected by the display modes.