The emotional design of an instructor: body gestures do not boost the effects of facial expressions in video lectures

ABSTRACT

A video lecture instructor exhibiting positive emotion has been shown to induce similar emotions in students, improving the students’ motivation and increasing their attention, thus improving their learning performance. However, little systematic research exists on which specific design features with regards to the instructor can induce such emotions. The current study aimed to test whether congruent body gestures boost the effects of an instructor’s facial expressions (happy vs. bored) on learning from video lectures in terms of students’ emotions, motivation, attention, cognitive load, and learning performance. There were four conditions: (1) a happy face without body gestures, (2) a happy face accompanied with happy body gestures, (3) a bored face without body gestures, and (4) a bored face accompanied with bored body gestures. One-way repeated ANOVAs showed that congruent body gestures strengthened the emotional effects, and strengthened the attentional split effects of the happy face; when the instructor did not produce body gestures, her happy face facilitated students’ learning performance compared to the bored face. Our findings suggest that instructors should be encouraged to exhibit a happy face without body gestures when giving video lectures to increase students’ learning.

KEYWORDS:

• Video lectures
• emotional design
• facial expressions
• body gestures

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Projects of the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant [62007023], the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (GK202103116). and the Research Program Funds of the Collaborative Innovation Center of Assessment toward Basic Education Quality at Beijing Normal University under Grant [2021-05-029-BZPK01].

Pi Zhongling: Conceptualization; Data curation; Writing - original draft; Formal analysis; Funding acquisition; Project administration; Writing - review & editing. Renjia Liu and Ling Hongjuan: Investigation; Methodology; Formal analysis; Writing - review & editing. Zhang Xingyu: Formal analysis; Wang Shuo: Writing - original draft; Li Xiying: Writing - original draft; Project administration; Writing - review & editing.