Daily Pleasures: Intensity, Significance, and Modality Specific Features of Auditorily and Visually Induced Emotions

Abstract

Visual communication in various digital medias, and increasingly personalized usage of such medias has become an extensive part of daily life. Yet, we are able to say little about the emotional, social or cognitive impact because there is a lack of theoretical understanding of the mechanisms through which these behaviors impact our experience. Experimental paradigm in general affords reliable ways of investigating emotional reactions, for example to visual stimulus, but its overt focus on the researcher-selected stimulus properties as the explanatory factor. Therefore, there is need for reshaping of the current tradition by changing focus away from stimulus properties towards subjective-contextual features. This study approaches the complex issues of the individual's emotional attachments by exploring the experience of pleasure induced by daily auditory and visual objects. Emotions are conceived here as motivational factor directing the individual's attachment towards particular objects. We claim that such engagement in music and visual culture must be understood much more comprehensively as mere entertainment. Therefore, the key aspects of emotional constitution, and impacts to the pleasure that audiovisuals induce, must be identified. The analysis focus on the relations between the strength of 1) object-induced emotions, 2) object-induced pleasure, and 3) the significance of daily auditory- and visual environments, based on respondents self-evaluations. The analysis will be executed by utilizing statistical methods. The results are discussed in terms of information selection. However, images hold power to deploy the viewers' emotions in the use of the provider of contents, such as commercial service providers or ideological communities.

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Author Information
Johanna Maksimainen, University of Jyvaskyla, Finland
Suvi Saarikallio, University of Jyvaskyla, Finland

• Category: Visual Communication

Posted by James Alexander Gordon

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