Abstract:

Recently, educational psychologists have paid much attention to the effect of emotional factors on multimedia learning, especially the induction of emotions which belongs to one of instructional designs. The effect of positive emotions in the learning process was mainly investigated through external mood induction and internal emotional design in previous studies which indicated that these two emotional induction methods both can induce positive emotions successfully. Nevertheless, the facilitation of positive emotions on multimedia learning performance had very small effect due to the diversity of the emotional induction method and the complexity of the multimedia learning process. In this article, results showed that the median effect sizes related to the effect of external mood induction on learning outcomes were d_retention = -0.25, d_{comprehension} = 0.04, d_transfer = 0.30, respectively; the median effect sizes related to the effect of internal emotional design on learning outcomes were d_retention = 0.27, d_{comprehension} = 0.36, d_transfer = 0.29, respectively. Induced emotions had little effect on subjective learning experience. According to cognitive affective theory of learning with media, the induction of positive emotions can improve learning through motivation. Cognitive load theory, however, predicts an opposite result of learning for the reason that the induction of positive emotions might bring about an increase of the learner’s extraneous cognitive load. Future studies should focus on the experimental manipulation and the effect evaluation of emotion itself, as well as the effect of the undiscovered moderator variables, etc.

Key words: positive emotions, multimedia learning, cognitive affective theory of learning with media, cognitive load theory