Physical Emotion Induction and Its Use in Entertainment: Lessons Learned

Abstract

It is well known that our emotional response is related to our bodily state, and more specifically that our bodily state can directly influence particular emotions we feel. It appears, however, that this fact has so far not had a significant influence in the entertainment industry. We first review existing work on physical emotion induction. Based on this work we present several techniques to influence emotional responses through physical means in a non-cognitive manner. The basis for the different techniques is a two-factor model of emotion: Pleasure and Arousal. We selected 4 sets of movie clips that correspond to the 4 possible quadrants existing in the 2 factor model. We have implemented some of the emotion induction techniques in a physical device (interactive chair) and tested the effects on the immersiveness of the movie clips and the emotional experience of the participants.

(E)Motion and Creativity

“…This finding is a novel contribution to research that aims to use embodied interaction designed based on characteristics of motor expressions to help regulate emotion [cf. 3,4,16,17,19,30]. Finally, our findings show that using positive approach rather than negative avoidance arm gestures augments creativity during an idea generation task and an insight problem solving task (H3).…”

“…20,21,23]. As such, this research provides opportunities for new technologies that draw on embodied interaction to help regulate emotion, including possible applications such as such as gaming and entertainment [3,4,17,19], education [16], and therapeutic technologies [30], as well as creativity support tools [20,21,23].…”

“…Therefore we cannot know from these results whether the function of motor expressions in emotion regulation can be hacked for emotions other than positive ones. Previous attempts at hacking the function of motor expressions in emotion regulation suffered from similar complications [19,30].…”

“…One project that uses electrical stimulation of the muscles involved in smiling as a therapeutic tool appears to augment coping [30]. Physical positioning using an automated chair has been used to impose postures that are congruent with movie scenes, which increased the perceived intensity of some positive movie scenes [19]. Embodied interactions have also been designed based on characteristics of motor expressions (postures) that associate with high and low power [16].…”

iFeel_IM! Emotion Enhancing Garment for Communication in Affect Sensitive Instant Messenger

“…To our knowledge, the only work concentrating on the emotion induction through physical means is described in [12]. The interactive chair changes emotional state of the subject watching the movie with rich emotional content.…”