More Attractive or More Interactive? The Effects of Multi-Leveled Emotional Design on Middle School Students' Multimedia Learning

Using Virtual Reality in the Care of Older Adults With Dementia: A Randomized Controlled Trial

There is a shortage of personnel to provide care for older adults with dementia, and traditional teaching methods could be improved. The teaching method used in the Care for Older Adults With Dementia course is mainly theoretical, lacking real-life care scenarios and practical procedural training. In the current study, we developed a virtual reality (VR) teaching system and designed a randomized controlled trial aimed at testing the availability of the VR-assisted teaching system, filling the gap in teaching through care scenarios, enabling students majoring in intelligent health and oldage care service management to have a more positive attitude toward learning, and improving students' knowledge and course satisfaction. This study showed that the developed VR system can meet the initial needs of daily teaching, help students have a more positive attitude toward learning, and improve their academic performance and course satisfaction. [Journal of Gerontological Nursing, 49(11), 25-32.].

Colors and Learner’s Gender Evoke Different Emotional and Cognitive Effects in Multimedia Learning

The emotional design principle avers that highly saturated warm colors in multimedia learning presentations can elevate affective-motivational, cognitive, and learning outcomes. While warm and achromatic grayscale color tones have been explored extensively, relatively less research examines the effects of cold colors in multimedia learning. This study explores how color tones (warm, cold, and achromatic grayscale) and learners’ gender influence positive emotions, intrinsic motivation, cognitive load, and transfer performance. An online experiment was conducted where learners pursuing IT courses in an Asian university ( $n=204$ ) engaged with either one of the multimedia learning lessons on distributed denial-of-service attack imbued with (1) a warm color tone, (2) a cold color tone, and (3) an achromatic grayscale color tone. Findings show that the cold color tone was associated with fewer enhanced positive emotion types than the other color tones. Compared to the achromatic grayscale color tone ( $M=2.38$ , $\text{SD}=1.88$ ), significantly higher extraneous cognitive load ratings were observed with the warm color tone ( $M=3.26$ , $\text{SD}=1.96$ ) and the cold color tone ( $M=3.24$ , $\text{SD}=2.18$ ). Following reports by some learners, this could be attributed to the overly vivid and saturated chromatic colors impairing the learners’ visual and cognitive processes, causing them to rate the multimedia learning experience with warm and cold color tones as more difficult than with the achromatic grayscale color tone. Male learners in the warm color tone condition ( $M=4.93$ , $\text{SD}=3.46$ ) performed marginally better on the transfer posttest than male learners in the cold color tone condition ( $M=3.49$ , $\text{SD}=3.45$ ) and male learners in the achromatic grayscale color tone condition ( $M=3.44$ , $\text{SD}=2.69$ ). In contrast, female learners in the warm color tone condition ( $M=1.75$ , $\text{SD}=1.62$ ) performed marginally worse than female learners in the cold color tone condition ( $M=3.83$ , $\text{SD}=3.92$ ) and significantly worse than female learners in the achromatic grayscale color tone condition ( $M=3.67$ , $\text{SD}=2.50$ ). Overall, these results show that gender can shape the effects of warm colors on learning—the warm color tone can enhance male learners’ but stifle female learners’ transfer performance. Moreover, this study aligns with recent studies that colors as an emotional design feature may lead to higher cognitive load ratings. This paper discusses the theoretical and practical implications and submits a future outlook for broadening the research domain.

Understanding preservice teachers' affective responses to VR-enabled scientific experiments

Preservice teachers' preparedness, perception, and affect toward certain technology systems influence the student acquisition of science knowledge, process skills, teaching innovation, and willingness to use technology in their classroom. The purpose of this study was to explore teachers' affective responses to a virtual reality-enabled scientific experiment (VaSE) system. Fifty-one preservice teachers majoring in educational technology participated in the study. They were divided into two groups, and their reactions were measured separately on two occasions. The first occasion used a standard system following the principle of Donald Norman's affective design model (ADM). The VaSE system was then revised with a strict version of ADM before the participants' reactions were measured for a second time. The positive and negative affect scale (PANAS) was utilized for affective state evaluation. Semi-structured interviews that focused on affective experiences were organized using an ADM framework and conducted immediately after the participants used VaSE. The results indicated that the positive affect experienced by the preservice teachers was significantly enhanced, and the negative affect was significantly weakened. Academic level, gender, and prior experience were important random effect factors that impacted the affective experience. It was also revealed that participants were more likely to be affected by immersion and interactivity in terms of enhancing positive affect and were more likely to be affected by behavioral layer elements in terms of weakening negative affect. A conclusion has been drawn to provide theoretical and practical suggestions for training preservice teachers in ways that improve their ability to integrate technology into the classroom.

Benefits of Affective Pedagogical Agents in Multimedia Instruction

The goal of the present study is to explore whether the affective states (happy or neutral) of a pedagogical agent (PA) in an online multimedia lesson yields different learning processes and outcomes, and whether the effects of affective PAs depend on the learners’ emotion regulation strategies and their prior knowledge. In three experiments, undergraduates were asked to view a narrated animation about synaptic transmission that included either a happy PA (smiling expression and enthusiastic voice) or a neutral PA (neutral expression and calm voice) and subsequently took emotions, motivation, cognitive outcomes tests. Across three experiments, the happy PA group reported more positive emotions (ds = 0.70, 0.46, and 0.60) and higher level of motivation (ds = 0.76, 0.49, and 0.51) than the neutral PA group. Moreover, the happy PA prompted higher germane load (d = 0.41) than a neutral PA in Experiment 3. However, adding a happy PA to the screen did not improve learning performance. In addition, in Experiment 2, learners’ usage of emotion regulation strategies moderated the effectiveness of affective PA on positive emotions in learners. Specifically, happy PAs increased the positive emotions of students who used expressive suppression strategy (d = 0.99) but not those who used cognitive reappraisal strategy (d = 0.13). In Experiment 3, the effectiveness of affective PAs was not moderated by learners’ prior knowledge. Results support the cognitive affective theory of learning with media (CATLM) that students are happier and more motivated when they learn from happy PAs than from neutral PAs.

The Influence of Academic Emotions on Learning Effects: A Systematic Review

Academic emotions can have different influences on learning effects, but these have not been systematically studied. In this paper, we objectively evaluate the influence of various academic emotions on learning effects and studied the relationship between positive and negative academic emotions and learning effects by using five electronic databases, including WOS, EMBASE, PubMed, PsycINFO, and Google Scholar. According to established standards, a total of 14 articles from 506 articles were included in the analysis. We divided the 14 studies into nine intervention studies and five observational studies; five of the nine intervention studies found that students who used active learning materials performed better and had higher mental loads than those who used neutral learning materials. Positive academic emotions promoted the learning effect. Four of the five observational studies with high school, college, and postgraduate participants reported that regulating academic emotions can improve learning effects. In conclusion, this paper holds that positive academic emotions are better than negative academic emotions at improving academic performance. In future research, a new method combining multichannel video observation, physiological data, and facial expression data is proposed to capture learners’ learning behavior in various learning environments.

The Effects of Emotional Design on Multimedia Learning and Appreciation of Chinese Poetry

Painting, music, literature, and other art forms embody the essence of human wisdom and induce esthetic experience, among which poetry is inherently creative, because it contains a wealth of symbols, imageries, insights, and so forth. The appreciation and learning of Chinese poetry is an important part of the curriculum in secondary schools. However, studies have mainly focused on textual characters of poetry, with little literature focusing on esthetic appreciation and in-depth learning of poetry. In this vein, we ask whether emotional designs will promote the appreciation and learning of Chinese poetry. To answer this question, we explored the influence of the combination of external emotion induction (positive and neutral movie clips) and internal colorful design (chromatic and achromatic) on esthetic preference and learning of poetry. One hundred and sixty-six participants (14–15 years old) were randomly assigned to one of four conditions created by two factors (external emotion induction and internal colorful design). The results showed that the combination of external emotion induction and internal colorful design promoted positive emotions, retention, and transfer performances of learners. Furthermore, perceived difficulty of learners decreased significantly when external emotional induction and internal colorful design were both positive. Consequently, these findings indicated that emotional designs in multimedia facilitated the learning performance of middle school students in Chinese poetry, and supported the cognitive-affective theory of learning with media. This research was a preliminary exploration of emotional design in humanities.

Linguistic Tone and Non-Linguistic Pitch Imitation in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders: A Cross-Linguistic Investigation

The conclusions on prosodic pitch features in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have primarily been derived from studies in non-tonal language speakers. This cross-linguistic study evaluated the performance of imitating Cantonese lexical tones and their non-linguistic (nonspeech) counterparts by Cantonese- and Mandarin-speaking children with and without ASD. Acoustic analyses showed that, compared with typically developing peers, children with ASD exhibited increased pitch variations when imitating lexical tones, while performed similarly when imitating the nonspeech counterparts. Furthermore, Mandarin-speaking children with ASD failed to exploit the phonological knowledge of segments to improve the imitation accuracy of non-native lexical tones. These findings help clarify the speech-specific pitch processing atypicality and phonological processing deficit in tone-language-speaking children with ASD.