The emotional and cognitive effect of immersion in film viewing

Abstract

This brief report presents an experiment testing the effect of immersion on emotional responses and cognitive genre categorisation of film viewers. Immersion of a film presentation was varied by presenting an animated movie either in a 3D-viewing condition (low immersive condition) or in a CAVE condition (high immersive condition, comparable to virtual reality experience). Viewers rated their emotions and categorised the movies into four basic film genres (action, drama, comedy, and non-fiction). Two distinct types of emotion were measured: Fictional World emotions (e.g., sadness) in response to the presented fictional events and Artefact emotions in response to the film as an artefact (e.g., fascination). Results showed that stronger immersion led to more intense emotions but did not influence genre categorisation. In line with expectations, both types of emotional response were intensified by high immersion. The results are explained by suggesting that highly immersive cinema has its impact on a basic dimension of emotion, namely arousal that underlies both types of emotions.

Keywords:

• Immersion
• Emotion
• Cognition
• Genre
• Virtual reality

Acknowledgements

The authors are indebted to Raymond de Vries who took care of the vector programming of the 3D movie. They also wish to thank the Faculty of Science, Mathematics and Computer Science of the University of Amsterdam, and the statistical computing centre SARA in Amsterdam for their support.