Immersive Design
  • Introduction
  • Course Program
  • Showcase
  • References
  • Class 0-2 Bootcamp
    • The Last Great Battle of the Samurai
    • Class 0: Sensing
    • Class 1: Design Tools
    • Class 2: Evaluation Basics
  • Spatial
    • Spatial Rationales: Food for Thought
    • Spatial Intimacy: Public Space
    • Spatial Intimacy: Social Space
    • Spatial Intimacy: Personal Space
    • Spatial Intimacy: Intimate Space
    • Spatial Form: Proportion & Rhythm
    • Spatial Flow: Movement & Direction
    • Spatial Sensing: Sensory Expressions
    • Spatial Sound: Edible Flavor
  • Embodiment
    • Embodiment: Kinesthetic Space
    • Embodiment: Gestural Kinesphere
    • Embodiment: Bodily Kinesphere
    • Embodiment: Harmony & Balance
    • Embodiment: Affordances & Microinteractions
  • Evaluation
    • Evaluation Topics: Immersion & Presence
    • Evaluation Topics: Emotional Immersion
    • Evaluation Topics: Body-Ownership
    • Evaluation Topics: User Tasks
    • Evaluation Topics: Navigation
    • Evaluation Topics: Wayfinding
    • Evaluation Topics: Human-System Control
    • Evaluation Topics: Feedback, feedforward & force feedback
  • Methods
    • Evaluation Methods: Setting up an Experiment
    • Evaluation Methods: Quantitative & Qualitative
    • Evaluation Methods: Materials
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  • Evaluating Emotions & Sentiment
  • Affective Intensity
  • Paradox of Empathy

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  1. Evaluation

Evaluation Topics: Emotional Immersion

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Last updated 5 years ago

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Evaluating Emotions & Sentiment

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Two important factors can be distinguished in evaluating emotional immersion: affective intensity and paradox of empathy.

Affective Intensity

Below is an excerpt from :

The following types of emotion are considered to be conductive to immersion on an emotional level. Note that a given emotion, as identified by a name, can occupy several categories. They are listed here in increasing order of affective intensity:

  • Subjective reactions to characters and judgments of their behavior. These include primarily like and dislike but also admiration, contempt, pity, amusement, Schadenfreude, and exasperation (when good things happen to bad characters). Subjective reaction involves a distanced evaluation rather than identification with the characters. Feeling admiration or contempt for characters can be explained by counterfactual reasoning, such as, “if an x behaved like p, I would admire x,”

  • Empathetic emotions, that is, emotions felt not for oneself but for others. defines empathy as “a spontaneous, vicarious sharing of affect” and as “feeling what we believe to be the emotions of others.” Empathetic emotions fall into the two broad categories of feeling: Sad or Happy for characters. Although they may be described in finer shades, such as pity, grief, and relief

  • Emotions felt for oneself, not for others, such as fear, horror, disgust, and sexual arousal.

The strongest feelings of empathy occur when bad things happen to likable characters, but readers do not experience grief for fictional characters in the same way they experience it for real people. They do, and do not, feel sorry for them. How can one get out of this impasse?

Paradox of Empathy

"We have emotions concerning fictional situations. We must believe in the propositions that describe the fictional situation. We do not believe the propositions than describe the situations represented in fiction." - , Nature of Fiction.

Empathy and Compassion

  • Empathy: you experience empathy when you actually feel the suffering of someone else.

  • Compassion: you feel compassion when you care about someone and want their pain to go away, without suffering yourself.

These can go together, but research shows that empathy and compassion are different and even activate different parts of the brain.

excerpt) The Emotion Thesaurus highlights 75 emotions and lists the possible body language cues, thoughts, and visceral responses for each.

A Theory of Narrative Empathy (
The Emotion Thesaurus
Narrative as Virtual Reality 2, Marie-Laure Ryan
Suzanne Keen
Gregory Currie
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