An investigation of how formal features in audio-visual narratives influence audience members' empathy and prosocial behaviour

视听叙事对观众对世界的认知和对他人的态度有很大的影响。将叙事的影响传递给受众的一个关键心理过程是移情，它被定义为对被观察的另一个人的心理状态的理解和体验。唤起共鸣可以有效地激发受众的亲社会(帮助)反应，这种反应的发生是一个良好运作的人类社会的基础。尽管视听叙事在叙事加工中具有重要作用，但视听叙事的成分如何影响观众的共情反应仍不清楚。以往对移情的研究只关注虚构性、叙事性和内容的影响，而忽略了形式特征的重要性。由于这一差距，媒体接收过程的基本部分仍然缺乏理论性。本项目建议传播学、心理学和计算机科学的学者之间进行跨学科的合作，以确定视听小说叙事中能够高精度预测观众共情和亲社会行为的形式特征，并测试与共情相关的个体差异的调节效果。(1)研究一：我们从描述人物之间共情社会互动的电影中随机抽取100个场景，并对其形式特征进行量化分析。形式特征的分析包括颜色、光照、运动、镜头比例、镜头长度、镜头角度和音乐等指标，这些指标被认为对电影场景的情感认同非常重要。对于视听分析，我们使用了情感计算中开发的计算机算法，使我们能够以高分辨率检查这些特征。接下来，我们进行一项实验，向每个参与者展示100个电影场景中的一个。观众的同理心是通过混合方法进行评估的。每个电影场景都是通过其正式特征、引发共鸣的内容以及观众引起的共情反应来描述的数据集被提交给多水平回归，以检验正式特征与观众共情之间的因果关系。(2)研究2：将在实验中测试个体差异(特质共情、情感需求、关注动机)的调节作用。研究一根据共情效应的显著程度和效应大小选取两个视听正式特征，以考察个体特质是否会影响正式特征对移情和亲社会行为的影响。研究结果对正式特征和个体差异在媒体加工中的主要作用和交互作用产生了新的理论知识。基于这一结果，还将有可能在未来更有效地设计和制作对观众的同理心和亲社会行为有很大影响的视听信息。

Audio-visual narratives have a powerful impact on audience members' perception of the world, and attitudes towards others. A key mental process that channels the impact of narratives on audiences is empathy, defined as the understanding and experiencing of mental states of an observed other person. Evoking empathy is effective in eliciting audiences' prosocial (helping) responses, the occurrence of which is fundamental for a well-functioning human society. Despite its importance in narrative processing, it is still unclear how the components of audio-visual narratives influence viewers' empathy response. Previous research into empathy focused only on the impact of fictionality, narrativity, and content but neglected the importance of formal features. Due to this gap fundamental parts of the media reception process remain undertheorized. The present project proposes an interdisciplinary collaboration among scholars in communication science, psychology, and computer science to identify those formal features in audio-visual fictional narratives that are capable of predicting viewers' empathy and prosocial behaviour with high accuracy, as well as to test the moderating effect of individual empathy-related differences. (1) Study 1: we select a random sample of 100 film scenes from movies depicting empathy-eliciting social interactions among human characters and analyze them for formal features in a quantitative way. The analysis of formal features includes metrics of color, lighting, motion, shot scale, shot length, camera angle, and music, assumed to be important to the emotional identity of a film scene. For the audio-visual analysis we employ computer algorithms developed in affective computing that enable us to examine these features at high resolution. Next, we conduct an experiment in which each participant is presented one of the hundred film scenes. Viewers' empathy is assessed by mixed methods. The dataset in which every film scene is described by metrics of its formal features, empathy-eliciting content, as well as viewers' evoked empathy response is submitted to multilevel regression to test the causal relationships between formal features and viewers' empathy.(2) Study 2: the moderating effects of individual differences (trait empathy, need for affect, mindreading motivation) will be tested in an experiment. Two audio-visual formal features will be selected from Study 1 based on significance and effect size of effects on empathy to examine whether individual traits modify the effect of formal features on empathy and prosocial behavior.Findings generate new theoretical knowledge on the main and interaction effects of formal features and individual differences in media processing. Based on this result it will also be possible to design and produce audiovisual messages that have a high impact on audiences' empathy and prosocial behavior more effectively in the future.