5105 - What Makes Us Care? Do physiological and emotional responses relate to decision-making
Abby Menendez
PCVS

Abstract


Introduction
Advertisements and propaganda often use emotional appeals designed to make people care about a certain cause or raise money for a charity. A previous experiment (What Makes Us Care: How media affects emotion and behaviour: Menendez, 2008) presented at Trent Science Fair last year, demonstrated that emotion has a significant role to play in decision-making behaviour. Specifically, it was found that students were more willing to support a cause when the video presentation for that cause involved highly emotional or distressing content and images. Physiological responses and patterns, such as heart rate and galvanic skin response (GSR, a measure of the electrical resistance of the skin), are closely associated with emotion and emotional arousal. One study (Kreibig, Willhelm, Roth & Gross, 2007) found differences in physiological response patterns between fear and sadness-inducing films. This suggests physiological measures can be used to study how people are affected by media.
I was interested in this issue because I am involved in various social justice initiatives. I wanted to explore how emotional appeals make people care and hopefully pinpoint what specific aspects of video presentations are most effective at eliciting an emotional reaction and influencing decision-making. This knowledge is valuable for advertisers and activists who use media to influence behaviour.

Purpose
The purpose of this experiment is to determine how the content of issue-based video clips affects physiologicalPeterborough Regional and emotional responses related to students donation decision-making.

Hypothesis
It was predicted that video clips with more distressing emotional content would cause more intense emotional responses and associated physiological responses (i.e., high heart rate and climbing galvanic skin response) in students and would influence them to support the cause. Spikes in physiological response were expected to correspond with parts of the film students identified as having a significant impact on their emotion and/or decision-making.

Procedure
Twenty-two high school students, balanced for gender and age, watched two video clips promoting different causes. One clip involved more emotionally distressing content than the other. The students were asked how to split a $100 donation between the two causes before and after they watched the movies. They were also asked to rate the type and strength of their emotional reactions to each film. During the movies each student s heart rate and galvanic skin response were monitored and recorded. After watching both movies each student was asked to identify which aspects or specific parts of the movies they felt affected them most emotionally and most influenced their donation decision. Physiological responses and self-ratings were examined and compared. The results replicate those from last year s experiment: more emotionally distressing films affected both the students emotional reactions and their behavior. In addition, subjects GSR levels were found to increase more during the more distressing video clips, and were found to be correlated with their self-ratings of emotion. Physiological measures did not yield any other significant results.