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The emotional experience of films: does Audio Description make a difference?

Experiencing emotion is one of the main reasons why we watch movies, go to the theatre or expose ourselves to different audiovisual manifestations. Audio Description attempts to provide the visually impaired with an experience similar to that offered by audiovisual formats such as cinema, dance or theatre. This paper focuses on Audio Description of films, with the aim of discovering whether there are differences between the emotional experience of films as whole audiovisual texts, films without the visual component (only music, sounds and dialogue) and films with Audio Description. We designed a study to measure the emotional experience in sighted and in visually impaired audiences. More specifically, we worked with three basic emotions (disgust, fear and sadness) and 15 film scenes that had been previously validated as effective stimuli in the psychological literature. Employing a Likert questionnaire (PANASX) and heart rate measurement, we compared the emotional impact of these scenes in three different versions (normal films, films without images and films with Audio Description) for 70 sighted and visually impaired subjects. Results showed statistically significant differences between the three stated versions for disgust and fear, but not for sadness.