C&I: emotions & sentiment
Design for Emotions & Sentiment
Emotions are not easy to grasp and research on emotions has been done for decades and probably will be. Cultural differences will show that emotions are interpreted in different ways. One of the biggest problem areas for writers is conveying a character's emotions to the reader in a unique, compelling way.
article 1: Designing for Real Feelings in VR article 2: The Emotion Thesaurus The Emotion Thesaurus comes to the rescue by highlighting 75 emotions and listing the possible body language cues, thoughts, and visceral responses for each.
Emotional Immersion
For creating Narrativity in Virtual Reality, Marie-Laure Ryan (see chapter Storytelling) notes that it is important to learn about your user's relation to the VR-experience on an emotional level. Two important factors can be distinguished and you can design for them: affective intensity and paradox of empathy.
Affective Intensity
Below is an excerpt from Narrative as Virtual Reality 2, Marie-Laure Ryan:
The following types of emotion are considered to be conductive to immersion on an emotional level. Note that a given emotion, as identified by a name, can occupy several categories. They are listed here in increasing order of affective intensity:
Subjective reactions to characters and judgments of their behavior. These include primarily like and dislike but also admiration, contempt, pity, amusement, Schadenfreude, and exasperation (when good things happen to bad characters). Subjective reaction involves a distanced evaluation rather than identification with the characters. Feeling admiration or contempt for characters can be explained by counterfactual reasoning, such as, “if an x behaved like p, I would admire x,”
Empathetic emotions, that is, emotions felt not for oneself but for others. Suzanne Keen defines empathy as “a spontaneous, vicarious sharing of affect” and as “feeling what we believe to be the emotions of others.” Empathetic emotions fall into the two broad categories of feeling: Sad or Happy for characters. Although they may be described in finer shades, such as pity, grief, and relief
Emotions felt for oneself, not for others, such as fear, horror, disgust, and sexual arousal.
The strongest feelings of empathy occur when bad things happen to likable characters, but readers do not experience grief for fictional characters in the same way they experience it for real people. They do, and do not, feel sorry for them. How can one get out of this impasse?
Paradox of Empathy
"We have emotions concerning fictional situations. We must believe in the propositions that describe the fictional situation. We do not believe the propositions than describe the situations represented in fiction." - Gregory Currie, Nature of Fiction.
Empathy and Compassion
Empathy: you experience empathy when you actually feel the suffering of someone else.
Compassion: you feel compassion when you care about someone and want their pain to go away, without suffering yourself.
These can go together, but research shows that empathy and compassion are different and even activate different parts of the brain.
A Theory of Narrative Empathy (excerpt) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Empathy, a vicarious, spontaneous sharing of affect, can be provoked by witnessing another's emotional state, by hearing about another's condition, or even by reading. Mirroring what a person might be expected to feel in that condition or context, empathy is thought to be a precursor to its semantic close relative, sympathy.
Personal distress, an aversive emotional response also characterized by apprehension of another's emotion, differs from empathy in that it focuses on the self and leads not to sympathy but to avoidance. The distinction between empathy and personal distress matters because empathy is associated with the moral emotion sympathy (also called empathic concern) and thus with prosocial or altruistic action. Empathy that leads to sympathy is by definition other-directed, whereas an over-aroused empathic response that creates personal distress (self-oriented and aversive) causes a turning-away from the provocative condition of the other."
For Narrativity in Virtual Reality, note the type of emotional reaction you'll need.
"None of the philosophers who put stock in the morally improving experience of narrative empathy include personal distress in their theories. Because novel reading can be so easily stopped or interrupted by an unpleasant emotional reaction to a book, however, personal distress has no place in a literary theory of empathy, though it certainly contributes to aesthetic emotions, such as those Sianne Ngai describes in her important book Ugly Feelings. In empathy, sometimes described as an emotion in its own right, we feel what we believe to be the emotions of others." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Additional Material
Human by Yann Arthus-Bertrand
What is it that makes us human? Is it that we love, that we fight ? That we laugh ? Cry ? Our curiosity ? The quest for discovery? Driven by these questions, filmmaker and artist Yann Arthus-Bertrand spent three years collecting real-life stories from 2,000 women and men in 60 countries. Working with a dedicated team of translators, journalists and cameramen, Yann captures deeply personal and emotional accounts of topics that unite us all; struggles with poverty, war, homophobia, and the future of our planet mixed with moments of love and happiness.
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