Running head: DIFFERENT MODALITIES OF PRESENTATION 1 Different Modality of Presentation: Effect of a Person's Perception of Happiness University of British Columbia Author Note Correspondence concerning this paper should be addressed to Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, 2136 West Mall, Vancouver BC, V6T 1Z4, Canada. Email: zoeshwang@gmail.com Student Number: 70002571
DIFFERENT MODALITIES OF PRESENTATION 2 Abstract Many people prefer to watch a movie rather than read a book. There are researches that have demonstrated the modality of presentation leads to different outcomes of learning and perception. Different modality of presentation has different level of stimuli that impact people's emotion. In this study, fifty-one UBC undergraduate students were recruited to watch a video or read the transcript of the video then complete a questionnaire that measures their perception of emotion at that moment. The study specifically focused on the person's perception of happiness between dual-mode presentation technique, such as a video, and single-modality format, such as a script. Obviously, participants who were randomly assigned to watch a video had higher positive emotion than participants who read a script. The result we had found was that more components of stimulus in a presentation would affect people's perception of emotion easily, which support our hypothesis.
DIFFERENT MODALITIES OF PRESENTATION 3 Different Modalities of Presentation: Affect a Person's Perception of Happiness People are more excited in a music concert rather than listening to music from an earphone. This phenomenon proves that having more components of stimuli affects people's perception directly than only one form of stimuli. Based on this point, we decided to study the relationship between the modality of presentation and people's perception of happiness. In our experiment, we provided videos and texts as two different modalities of presentation, rating their level of happiness by an emotion rating scale. Many existing researches and studies had investigated the similar topic in psychological field. Having two components of stimuli had been shown to lead to superior learning than only one form of stimuli (Tindall-Ford, 1997). Instead of learning efficiency, we measured participants' perception of positive emotion, happiness. In the other words, the emotion they took in from an object was also a process of learning. The experiment was a post-test design. In the experiment, we had an experimental group and a control group, representing a happy context and a neutral context. The independent variable was the modality of presentation that was videos and texts. The dependent variable was that how affected people were by their modes of presentation on their happiness. The operational definition of happiness was represented by the total positive score on PANAS scale which was a emotion rating scale. Our hypothesis was that the video condition had a greater effect on the participant's level of happiness than the reading condition, and it also was the result what we were expected. Method