Characters' Visual Style on Viewers' Empathy and Sympathy

2019
Constructing a compelling character with which people can empathize is an essential process in character design. Successful characters allow audiences to put themselves in the character’s shoes, so to speak, and emotionally connect with the character. The purpose of this experimental study was to examine the effect of visual styles of three-dimensional animated characters on audience empathy and sympathy responses.
Problem Statement
Despite the increasing interest in virtual characters and how they can emotionally affect people, little attention has been paid to how the visual elements of a character influence people’s emotional response.
Research Question
Does the degree of stylization of an animated character affect audience empathy and sympathy?
Method
Experimetal study  (Quantitative data)
Tools
Maya
Photoshop
AfterEffect
Click to read the paper
Experiment (n = 71)
Objective
The purpose of this experimental study was to examine the effect of visual styles of three-dimensional animated characters on audience empathy and sympathy responses

ASSESSING EMPATHIC RESPONSE
Escalas and Stern's empathy and sympathy questionnaire was modified to fit the scope of this study. It consisted of five sympathy and five empathy questions, and participants answered on a five-point scale ranging from "strongly disagree" to "strongly agree".
  1. I understood what the character was feeling in the videos
  2. I understood what was bothering the character
  3. I tried to understand the events as they occurred
  4. I tried to understand the character’s motivationI tried to understand the events as they occurred
  5. I was able to recognize the problems that the character had in the last two videos hadI tried to understand the events as they occurred
  6. I experienced feeling as if the events were happening to meI tried to understand the events as they occurred
  7. I felt as though I was the characterI tried to understand the events as they occurred
  8. I felt as though the events in the videos were happening to meI tried to understand the events as they occurred
  9. I experienced many of the same feeling that the character portrayedI tried to understand the events as they occurred
  10. I felt as if the characters’ feelings were my own
STIMULI
Three 3D animated characters were created with Autodesk Maya software. All three characters were of the same gender and approximately same age. The only intended difference was the degree of stylization, which caused the proportion of the characters’ bodies and facial features to be different.

In order to mediate empathy via emotion, the audience needs to recognize the emotions the characters are presenting. The emotions represented in the animations were happy, angry and sad, which are three of the six basic emotions by Ekman. These three emotions were selected because they are easily recognizable. The selected emotions were expressed through characters facial expressions and mainly through body animation.
Subject
71 subjects, both undergraduate and graduate students participated in the study. All participants were students at Purdue University and were recruited via email. The age of the participants ranged from 18 to 27; 48% were male. 35 participants indicated that they majored in Computer Graphics Technology (CGT), the others were non- CGT majors.
PROCEDURE
Participants completed the online survey using their own computers or smartphones and the survey remained active for two weeks. In the survey, participants first answered demographic questionnaires, and then watched the three characters in a random order. After viewing one emotion clip, subjects were asked to select what emotion the character was feeling; four choices were provided (happy, sad, angry and other, where option ‘other’ allowed users to type the emotion they thought the character was displaying in the clip). After viewing all three emotion clips for one character, the participants took a questionnaire that measured their emotional response towards the character. After completing the questionnaire, they proceeded to the next set of clips.
Findings
Findings from the statistical analyses, which included a one-way ANOVA model and a linear mixed model, revealed no significant difference in subjects’ empathy and sympathy levels among the three characters. This suggests that any influence of character visual style, at least in the laboratory setting, is relatively weak. In addition to showing no main effect of the character’s visual style, our study found no significant interaction between participants’ age, gender, major, characters’ age, and participants’ empathy and sympathy levels.
‍
Creating more realistic characters is expensive in comparison to iconized characters. The lack of significant difference in sympathy and empathy ratings between character types suggests that the cost/benefit ratio for iconic characters may be best for situations in which the animator is seeking to elicit emotional responses from the viewer.
JP 2023