- Researching What I Intend To Create
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Abstract:
- Comics is an uncharted fictional medium which can communicate complex narratives to readers. Researchers have operationalised comic book and webcomic immersion through assessing perceptions of photographic and schematic faces to investigate how humans detect and categorise emotions. However, none have used the context of a comic narrative and comic familiarity to explain immersion. Thus, this study investigated whether Visual Abstraction and Comic Exposure can predict Emotional Engagement within a comic narrative. Participants (n = 129) answered an adjusted version of the Fictional Media Exposure Test (Iannotta, 2021), read either a High or Medium Abstract version of an original webcomic, did an emotion recognition and categorisation task and completed a narrative immersion questionnaire. Most notably, regression analyses found that Visual Abstraction is a significant predictor of emotion recognition accuracy and emotion categorisation, while CFMET scores predicted emotion recognition accuracy. These findings inform comic creators of the importance of design and familiarity on comic immersion and make suggestions for future researchers investigating the communicative ability and emotional impact of visual storytelling.
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