Affective video on the web: exploring presentation and task effects

The study explores whether and how video applied in a web environment can be effective in evoking affective responses and how these responses may influence task performance. Four research questions were developed and explored in three experiments. The study made clear that video in a web environment is capable of evoking affective responses, comparable to video applied in a television setting. In web-based applications video display size typically varies. Image size was taken as one of the variables to determine its impact on emotional responses. Even though some of the literature suggests that emotional valence responses might not be affected by image size manipulations, this study found an image-size effect for video content that varied on a positive-negative dimension. The study further indicated that the video-evoked affect has an impact on task activities presented in a web environment. The first experiment showed that after a positive video clip a subsequent neutral clip was perceived as negative, and after a negative video clip the subsequent neutral video clip evoked more positive feelings. The second experiment demonstrated that video-evoked negative affective responses facilitated and positive affective responses inhibited performance on an insight task. In the third experiment the impact of video design was examined. Camera manipulations, such as shot length and camera height, influenced the perception of the characters and their relative roles in the video scene. In all, the study suggests that the web environment itself has no impact on the affective responses to video, but presentation variables, such as video design and video image size can have an influence on the affective potential of video content and on the relationship between video-evoked affective responses and task performance in a web environment.