Visual angle modulates affective responses to audiovisual stimuli
Computers in Human Behavior, (August 2020)DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2020.106346
Abstract
What we see influences our emotions.
Technology often mediates the visual content we perceive.
Visual angle is an essential parameter of how we see such content.
It operationalizes visible properties of human-computer interfaces.
However, we know little about the content-independent effect of visual angle on emotional responses to audiovisual stimuli.
We show that visual angle alone affects emotional responses to audiovisual features, independent of object perception.
We conducted a 2 x 2 x 3 factorial repeated-measures experiment with 143 undergraduate students.
We simultaneously presented monochrome rectangles with pure tones and assessed valence, arousal, and dominance.
In the high visual angle condition, arousal increased, valence and dominance decreased, and lightness modulated arousal.
In the low visual angle condition, pitch modulated arousal, and lightness affected valence.
Visual angle weights the affective relevance of perception modalities independent of spatial representations.
Visual angle serves as an early-stage perceptual feature for organizing emotional responses.
Control of this presentation layer allows for provoking or avoiding emotional response where intended.