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

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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.