How do sound and color features affect self-report emotional experience in response to film clips?

Previous research has shown that the use of short film clips is one of the most successful and widely-used methods of emotion elicitation. Nevertheless, there is a high degree of audiovisual variation across film clips, resulting in a trade-off in terms of controllability. To address this complexity, the present study aimed to investigate the potential effects of sound and color on film clips’ emotion-elicitation levels. For this purpose, four different film clips were selected for each of the eight emotion categories: amusement, tenderness, calmness, anger, sadness, disgust, fear, and neutrality. All film clips were manipulated in terms of features of sound (sound versus silent) × color (color versus BW). In total, 128 film clips were tested online on various parameters: intensity of target emotion, valence, arousal, discreteness, and non-target emotions. The results revealed that sound was a mild contributing factor in increasing the degree of target emotions and evoking less boredom and more interest. However, color effects were less pronounced in emotion-elicitation using film clips. Furthermore, the study provided preliminary evidence that for most of the film clips, there was no significant difference in emotional reactivity in response to subtitled versus dubbed film clips. In conclusion, the current study showed that film clips (with a few exceptions) can evoke moderate to high levels of emotions independent of their bottom-up features, such as sound or color.