Emotional Responses to Immersive Media – Silicon Spectra perspective

The five experiments presented in this thesis aimed to investigate the relationship between subjective presence and subjective and physiological emotional responses. The investigation served as an initial step in the evaluation of emotion-based corroborative measures of presence. Two of the determinants of presence were experimentally manipulated in order to create varying levels of presence and different types of subjective and physiological emotional responses. Media Content with varying types of emotional impact was presented to participants via the video displays . The research showed that enhancements in Media Form increased both subjective presence and subjective arousal across all Content types. Differences in SUbjective presence between Media Contents shown to elicit different types of subjective emotion were investigated and correlations between subjective presence and subjective emotion were examined. The research indicated that the quality and intensity of emotional responses elicited by Media Content are potentially important determinants of subjective presence.