Research Project - Artefact 2 Reflections

Hypothesis -'I believe that if you give context to a characters emotional reaction the emotion will be easier to recognize than without it.

Looking at my hypothesis for this artefact I believe the results I got from the focus group were fairly successful.
With each set animations the answers for what emotion was being conveyed altered depending on contexts inclusion and in most cases became more affirmed in the latter scenes when context was added. The correct general emotion was recognised in all of the scenes however an interesting point I found was the specificity of said emotion changed depending on which context was applied. For instance, with the anger clips, the first featuring no context was read as being an internal conflict with building frustration. Adding the context of a falling ball gave a similar result of pent-up anger with the ball being suggested as the final straw in a string of angering occurrences. Finally, against the character based context clip, it was again read as pent-up anger, however now with the idea it was prior to a response or "release" of this anger, either directed at the other character or in some other manner.

The feedback I received on the format of my artefact is going to be very useful for the next ones as it gave some alternatives for how I could have utilised the different forms of context as well as a drawback to the three short clips way I presented it. The drawback, which also had a minor influence on the results, was how the responses for the third clip were "sullied" by the second, with people considering their answer for the second clip when answering for the third. This may have meant that the responses for the final clips of each section weren't completely unbiased, however I feel this is unlikely to have altered the results too much, having discussed each clip in turn as well.

A consideration for how to alter my artefact, which could both improve the results and avoid the drawback stated above, was to have the clips featuring the second character be effected by the inclusion of the second character. For example, by having the second character being the cause of the emotional reaction, the way it is conveyed will be different, with it being focused towards said character, rather than just being a general maintained action throughout all three clips. This would then feature the main character performing a different action, however still be conveying the same emotion just in a more suitable way for each form of context.