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ABSTRACT
Around the world, guidelines have been created to establish a clear procedure on how to create audio description. These put emphasis on the objectivity principle. However, in recent years this principle has been widely criticized, and a more narrative approach has been encouraged, although the reception of these opposing styles has not been compared experimentally. At the same time, while emotions play a central role in the filmic experience, the emotional reception of audio description in films has been tested on very few occasions. This paper analyses the differences in the emotional response to two audio description versions: a more objective version vs. a subjective version including metaphors, inferences, and subjective evaluation. We worked with 15 film scenes eliciting disgust, fear, and sadness to analyse how sighted and unsighted participants react at an emotional level. Emotions were measured by means of a Likert questionnaire and measurements of the heart rate. The results point to statistically significant differences between the versions in the case of fear and especially sadness, but not disgust.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Dr. Ana Mª Rojo López for her extremely valuable help and support in the process of conducting and writing this piece of research.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Miall and Kuiken (Citation1999) define literariness in the light of previous findings on the processing of texts and propose a three-component model of literary texts involving foregrounded text features, readers’ defamiliarizing responses to them, and the modification of personal meaning as a consequence. The main result of their study is that feeling, not cognition, is the main vehicle for the processes of literary understanding.
2. Prior exposure to films was controlled (cf. Section 2.4).
3. Clips 1, 8, and 15 were used as a control. This is explained later in the paper, under section 2.6, Control of extraneous variables.
4. For each of the 15 films, the variables are the selected items of the PANAS-X (cf. ) and HR data.
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Marina Ramos Caro
Marina Ramos studied Translation and Interpreting at the University of Granada, with a focus on German and English translation into Spanish. In September 2009 she completed a Master in English Linguistics at the University of Murcia with a research project about cognitive linguistics. Since then, she has been lecturing Translation at the University of Murcia. In October 2013, she defended her PhD thesis on the emotional impact of Audio Description. Dr. Ramos has been awarded several international grants and presented her research in different international conferences.