Investigating 4D movie audiences’ emotional responses to motion effects and empathy

Highlights

• The emotional responses of a 4D movie audience to motion effects were assessed.

• Participants with varying empathy levels viewed clips with/without motion effects.

• Five guidelines for designing motion effects in 4D movies were proposed.

• How motion effects and empathy were affected depended on the displayed emotion.

• Correlations between negative emotions were more frequent in those with low empathy.

Abstract

Designing 4D effects corresponding to audiences' emotional responses is important because 4D effects are critical components of 4D movies that provide rich emotional experiences. The recent increasing popularity of 4D content has led to the development of motion effect technology, which involves motions of the chair according to the scene. However, it is difficult to find studies that systematically investigated the influence of motion effects on audiences' emotional responses. This study investigated the emotional responses of a 4D movie audience to motion effects according to their level of empathy. Participants (mean: 25.0 years, standard deviation: 5.0) with varying levels of empathy watched movie clips provided with or without single pitch motion effects. The degree that the motion effect and empathy affected the elicited emotions differed depending on the emotion type. For example, participants with high empathy reported stronger intensity of fear when short and weak motion effects were exhibited than when there was no motion effect. Distinct motion effect design guidelines that can be adopted to enhance audiences’ emotional experiences were proposed. The findings can be referred to when investigating the emotional responses of 4D movie audiences.

Introduction

Movies are experiential products that elicit various emotions in an audience (Cooper-Martin, 1991). The audience evaluates a movie based on its emotional experiences (Elisahberg & Sawhney, 1994, Shapiro & Biggers, 1987). Emotional experiences, such as gaining pleasure from watching a movie or feeling emotions that the characters express, form audiences' positive attitudes toward a movie (Choi & Lim, 2009). Emotions are a person's inner feelings and state of mind caused by external or internal factors (Kim et al., 2016). The audience experiences emotions mainly by understanding and empathizing with the characters when watching a movie (Jones & Dawkins, 2018).

The emotions that the audience feels while watching a movie may vary depending on personal characteristics such as social/cultural background, personality, and empathy (Hoffner, 2009; Kim et al., 2016; Wied et al., 1994). Empathy is the ability to accurately perceive emotional information from others (Levenson & Ruef, 1992). Empathy makes each member of the audience perceive pleasure (Hoekstra et al., 1999; Oliver, 1993) and the emotions of characters differently (Davis et al., 1987). Therefore, empathy is a key factor in observing the emotional responses of movie audiences.

The movie industry has recently introduced 4D effects in movies to enhance audiences’ emotional experiences. 4D effects are physical effects such as motion, vibration, lighting, smell, and wind, which are provided with 2D or 3D video. Most 4D movies are screened by several 4D system manufactures, such as D-BOX in Canada, MediMotion in the United States, and CJ 4DPlex in South Korea. CJ 4DPlex operates 737 4D theaters in 65 countries (CJ4DPLEX, 2020).

Among all 4D effects, the motion of the seat, called the motion effect, appears in the largest proportion (58.4%) of 4D movies (Lee, Han, & Choi, 2016a, 2016b). Motion effects are produced by imitating features such as camera movements, object movements, and sounds. Some studies have proposed authoring tools for 4D broadcasting (Kim, 2013; Kim et al., 2010; Waltl et al., 2013), automatic annotation methods (which annotate the video segment that can provide 4D effects; Abreu et al., 2019; Zhou et al., 2018), and automatic 4D effect generators by extracting audiovisual features (Lee & Choi, 2013; Lee et al., 2016a, 2016b; Shin et al., 2014). In the industry, the creators of 4D effects produce motion effects with utmost care for “story and emotion” (Kim, 2015). However, the manner in which specific motion effects affect the audience's emotional state has not been studied carefully, mostly because 4D movies have only recently become popular. Although CJ 4DPLEX debuted in 2009, it expanded globally in 2017 (CJ4DPLEX, 2020). Nevertheless, this knowledge is indispensable for designing cognitively compelling motion effects for 4D movies. To the authors' knowledge, this was the first study to examine the emotional responses of 4D movie audience when they experience motion effects.

The emphasis was on understanding the association between the audiences' emotional responses, their level of empathy and the characteristics of single pitch motions. The research questions (RQs) were as follows: RQ1. Among the single pitch motion, empathy, and movie clips, what are the factors that influence audiences’ emotional responses? RQ2. Do the emotional responses vary depending on the levels of a single pitch motion, empathy, and movie clips?

In a single pitch motion, the chair exhibits a pitch up or pitch down motion, and then slowly returns to the neutral posture. Participants were asked to watch movie clips with or without single pitch motion effects. Based on these results, some design guidelines on motion effects for eliciting the desired emotional responses from 4D movie audience were proposed.

The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. The surveys conducted for this study are described in Section 2. The experimental methods are described in detail in Section 3. The experimental results are described in Section 4. The implications of the results and future research directions are discussed in Section 5. Finally, the study is concluded in Section 6.