Personality, Culture, and System Factors - Impact on Affective Response to Multimedia

TL;DR

This study investigates how personality, culture, and system parameters like frame rate and resolution jointly influence users' emotional responses and enjoyment of multimedia content, highlighting the importance of human factors.

Contribution

It introduces predictive models that incorporate personality and culture traits alongside system factors to better predict affect and enjoyment in multimedia experiences.

Findings

Personality and culture explain up to 13.6% of affect variance.

Human factors improve prediction accuracy of affect and enjoyment.

Significant correlation between affect and enjoyment was observed.

Abstract

Whilst affective responses to various forms and genres of multimedia content have been well researched, precious few studies have investigated the combined impact that multimedia system parameters and human factors have on affect. Consequently, in this paper we explore the role that two primordial dimensions of human factors - personality and culture - in conjunction with system factors - frame rate, resolution, and bit rate - have on user affect and enjoyment of multimedia presentations. To this end, a two-site, cross-cultural study was undertaken, the results of which produced three predictve models. Personality and Culture traits were shown statistically to represent 5.6% of the variance in positive affect, 13.6% in negative affect and 9.3% in enjoyment. The correlation between affect and enjoyment, was significant. Predictive modeling incorporating human factors showed about 8%, 7% and 9% improvement in predicting positive affect, negative affect and enjoyment respectively when compared to models trained only on system factors. Results and analysis indicate the significant role played by human factors in influencing affect that users experience while watching multimedia.