Effects of screen size on emotions in digital reading.

Werlen, Egon and Moser, Ivan and Bergamin, Per (2017) Effects of screen size on emotions in digital reading. In: 15th SPS SGP SSP Conference 2017. "Treasuring the Diversity of Psychology". 15th SPS SGP SSP Conference 2017. "Treasuring the Diversity of Psychology". Lausanne, 4th September 2017, Lausanne.

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Abstract

The goal of this work is to experimentally investigate the influence of screen size on emotions while reading texts with different emotional content. We had 102 college students read three texts with different emotional content (neutral, negative, positive) on three randomly assigned screen sizes (laptop, tablet, smartphone). After each text, the participants were asked to indicate their current emotional state in terms of valence and arousal. Additionally, valence and arousal of the participants were objectively analysed with an automated facial expression recognition software-FaceReader. We observed that the objectively measured valence was more negative on the small screen compared to the large screen. Subjectively, the positive texts lead to lower arousal and more positive valence than the negative texts. Interactions between emotional content of the texts and screen size were not found. We conclude that irrespective of text content, larger screens are emotionally beneficial in digital reading.

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