Understanding the Positivity Principle With Human and Animated Instructors

• In Event: Studies of Technology and Social, Emotional, or Motivational Constructs

Abstract

An emerging area of educational research concerns the role of emotion in computer-based multimedia instruction (Mayer, 2020; Moreno & Mayer, 2007; Plass & Kaplan, 2016). This paper presents two studies that investigated the positivity principle, which states that people learn better from instructors who exhibit positive rather than negative emotion. Students viewed a video lecture on statistics from a human or animated instructor displaying one of four emotional tones: happy, content, frustrated, or bored. For human and animated instructors, learners rated positive instructors higher on positive emotion and rated negative instructors higher on negative emotions. Learners who viewed positive instructors scored higher on a delayed test, for human but not animated instructors. We discuss implications for the positivity principle.

Authors

• Alyssa Lawson, University of California - Santa Barbara

• Richard E. Mayer, University of California - Santa Barbara

• Ashleigh Wells, University of California - Santa Barbara