Emotional Design in Multimedia Learning

Um, E. & Plass, J.L. (2010). Emotional Design in Multimedia Learning. Submitted for publication.


Paper describes the study about whether multimedia learning environments can be designed to induce positive emotions and whether these emotions enhance comprehension of the material.


facilitation hypothesis: positive moods facilitate performance on solving tasks
Isen et al. found that:
1-long term memory: positive affect can serve as a retrieval cue for positive material 
2-positive mood may affect cognitive processes 
suppression hypothesis: moods can have negative effect on reasoning
can impose unnecessary load - extraneous cognitive load  


Emotions as extraneous cognitive load:
adding unimportant but interesting elements can result in extraneous cognitive load.
Positive or negative emotions can both be activating or deactivating


Study in this paper investigates the design within three effects:
color combination: warm cause arousal of emotions, high saturation effects feelings of excitement, -saturated and analogous bright warm colors
anthropomorphism: human like elements are perceived better than non human, e.g. adding facial expression to body cells in a simulation
baby-face bias: people or things with round features, small nose, large eyes, short chins perceived as baby like and result in arousals of feelings: innocence, honesty, helplessness which induce positive affect in the learner


Results:
-positive emotions can be induced through the learning material by applying emotional design principles
-internal induction of positive emotions through emotional design increased comprehension and transfer
-positive emotions:

• induced before the learning task reduce the mental effort during learning,
• induced during the learning task, reduced the perceived difficulty of the learning task

-learners' satisfaction increased with the positive emotions