Audio description remains the cornerstone of accessibility for visually impaired audiences to all sorts of audiovisual content, including porn. Existing work points to the efficacy of audio description to guarantee immersion and emotional engagement, but evidence on its role in sexual arousal and engagement in porn is still scant. The present study takes on this challenge by comparing sighted and visually impaired participants’ experiences with porn in terms of their physiological response [i.e., cortisol and heart rate (HR)] and self-report measures of affect [Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS); Watson et al., 1988], anxiety [State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI); Spielberger et al., 1970], sexual reactivity and arousal [Sexual Inhibition/Sexual Excitation Scale (SIS/SES); Moyano and Sierra (2014); and the Ratings of Sexual Arousal (RSA); Mosher (2011)], and narrative engagement or transportation [The Transport Narrative Questionnaire, Green and Brock (2013)]. 69 Spanish participants were allocated into three different groups: 25 sighted participants who watched and heard the porn scenes in their audio-visual version (AV); 22 sighted participants who listened to the audio described version without images (AD); and 22 visually impaired participants who also listened to the audio described version without images (ONCE). Overall, results on physiological and self-report measures revealed no significant differences between groups or different versions of the clips. The analysis of cortisol reactivity to porn as the maximum increase or decrease in cortisol (t+12) with respect to baseline values (t−20) revealed no significant differences between the groups, but pointed to a higher percentage of non-responders than responders in the three groups, the highest being found in the ONCE group. As for participants’ cardiac response to the clips, no significant differences were found across the groups, with the highest HR levels being registered in the baseline phase. Self-report measures revealed significant between-group differences in negative affect. The ONCE group displayed the highest pre-task levels of negative affect and was the only group that showed a decrease in negative affect after exposure to the clips. Sighted and visually impaired participants reported to be moderately aroused and immersed in the films, regardless of exposure to AV or AD porn. In addition, correlations found between participants’ levels of self-report sexual arousal and transportation and post-task affect pointed to a positive relationship between exposure to porn and perceived levels of sexual arousal and affect. Results from the study reflected the efficacy of audio description in providing sighted and visually impaired audiences with a similar experience to that offered by original AV porn scenes. This study is exploratory but provides valid, initial groundwork for further research on the impact of audio description on porn reception.
Stress is assumed to be intrinsic to interpreting and the ability to manage it a presumed predictor of performance. And yet, empirical research on the role of stress in interpreting has remained scarce. This study explores the impact of stress and anxiety on the academic scores, heart rate (HR) and speech rhythm of 23 student interpreters in a liaison interpreting task. Participants' stress and anxiety are measured using HR measures and the STAI test. Their speech rhythm is automatically analyzed through different indexes deriving from the variability of syllabic intervals. Results show that students' grades negatively correlate with their levels of state anxiety, which are, in turn, significantly related to their rhythmic parameters in L1-L2 interpreting. Greater rhythmic variability correlates with students' lower examination scores when speech is delivered into their L2. A significant increase in mean HR is reported during the interpreting task phase as compared with baseline and recovery phase, suggesting that HR was a sensitive marker to detect the students' stress response, but not to the level of influencing performance. Results point to the need to triangulate different measures to obtain a complete picture of how stress and anxiety may impact interpreting performance.
Translators face hectic daily schedules with deadlines they must duly meet. As trainees they receive tuition on how to work swiftly to meet them efficiently. But despite the prominent role of time pressure, its effects on the translation process are still scarcely researched. Studies point to the higher occurrence of errors under stringent time constraints. Most of these studies use key-logging or eye-tracking techniques to identify the problems encountered. But no attempt has yet been made to measure the physiological effects of time pressure in English-to-Spanish translation and their interplay with trainees’ psychological state. The present study researches the influence of time pressure on translation by exploring trainees’ physiological response (i.e., salivary cortisol) and psychological traits (i.e., self-esteem and anxiety). 33 Spanish translation trainees translated 3 English literary texts under different time pressure conditions: Text 1 (no time limit), Text 2 (10 minutes), Text 3 (5 minutes). Regression analysis results showed that higher cortisol levels during preparation predicted higher number of meaning errors in Text 1 and lower number of translated words in Text 2 and 3. Besides, higher trait anxiety emerged as predictor of lower number of translated words, but higher accuracy under extreme time constraints and in the absence of time pressure. Higher self-esteem correlated with lower levels of anxiety and lower levels of cortisol during preparation and recovery, suggesting that it may act as a protective factor against stress. And yet, the regression analysis showed that higher self-esteem predicted lower meaning and total accuracy under extreme time pressure. Besides, in our correlation analysis self-esteem was positively related to the number of translated words in Text 2 and 3. Results suggest that even if self-esteem could be a protective factor against stress, it may also have a negative effect on task performance mediated by overconfidence.
Research on audio description (AD) has undergone an enormous development in the last decade. Unfortunately, little attention has been devoted to the social, psychological and emotional factors influencing AD, one exception being the recent line of research which empirically explores the emotional reception of AD (Ramos & Rojo, 2014; Ramos, 2015, 2016) and the influence of psychological factors in its production phase (Ramos & Rojo, 2020). Results from these studies satisfactorily prove that audio described films are capable of evoking a similar emotional response to that elicited by their audiovisual counterparts, especially for scenes inducing disgust and fear, and that reception and production depend largely on film typology. The purpose of this new study is to analyse whether the audio described version of porn scenes can also offer its audience a similar experience to that provided by the original audiovisual scenes. Forty-seven sighted and visually impaired women (mean age = 25.12) took part in the experiment. The sample was divided into two groups: 25 sighted women watched the original audiovisual version of the clips, whereas 22 visually impaired women listened to the audio described version. Participants’ emotional response was analysed by a combination of an indicator of autonomic activation (heart rate, HR,) and self-report measures. Our results indicate that audio described porn films are capable of eliciting a similar response in both blind and sighted audiences to the one evoked by original audiovisual scenes.
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