Modeling Reader's Emotional State Response on Document's Typographic Elements

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Abstract

We present the results of an experimental study towards modeling the reader's emotional state variations induced by the typographic elements in electronic documents. Based on the dimensional theory of emotions we investigate how typographic elements, like font style (bold, italics, bold-italics) and font (type, size, color and background color), affect the reader's emotional states, namely, Pleasure, Arousal, and Dominance (PAD). An experimental procedure was implemented conforming to International Affective Picture System guidelines and incorporating the Self-Assessment Manikin test. Thirty students participated in the experiment. The stimulus was a short paragraph of text for which any content, emotion, and/or domain dependent information was excluded. The Analysis of Variance revealed the dependency of (a) all the three emotional dimensions on font size and font/background color combinations and (b) the Pleasure dimension on font type and font style. We introduce a set of mapping rules showing how PAD vary on the discrete values of font style and font type elements. Moreover, we introduce a set of equations describing the PAD dimensions' dependency on font size. This novel model can contribute to the automated reader's emotional state extraction in order, for example, to enhance the acoustic rendition of the documents, utilizing text-to-speech synthesis.

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Affective reactions to acoustic stimuli.

M M Bradley, P J Lang (2000)

Emotional reactions to naturally occurring sounds (e.g., screams, erotica, bombs, etc.) were investigated in two studies. In Experiment 1, subjects rated the pleasure and arousal elicited when listening to each of 60 sounds, followed by an incidental free recall task. The shape of the two-dimensional affective space defined by the mean ratings for each sound was similar to that previously obtained for pictures, and, like memory for pictures, free recall was highest for emotionally arousing stimuli. In Experiment 2, autonomic and facial electromyographic (EMG) activity were recorded while a new group of subjects listened to the same set of sounds; the startle reflex was measured using visual probes. Listening to unpleasant sounds resulted in larger startle reflexes, more corrugator EMG activity, and larger heart rate deceleration compared with listening to pleasant sounds. Electrodermal reactions were larger for emotionally arousing than for neutral materials. Taken together, the data suggest that acoustic cues activate the appetitive and defensive motivational circuits underlying emotional expression in ways similar to pictures.