Week 2

At the start of this week I was assigned to look in to the Self Assessed Manikin (SAM) method of processing emotional responses, and went about creating some simple graphs which showed which emotions each quadrant represented, using some of the PDF files on SAM we had found. The only problem encountered with this was the use of Dominance on the SAM form. After doing more research, it was determined that it separates the more subtle emotional differences such as anger and fear, with anger being more dominated, and fear with total control.

On Thursday we did some control testing using our two maps, although there were some initial problems that we managed to solve (such as running a map with no lighting compiled causes all other maps loaded to have no lighting). From the data we gathered from this control test, I put it into a graph which showed some unexpected results, such as those who played the map with full lighting compiled were more excited that we expected, although most of those who played the map with all ambient-lit lighting ended up closer to “calm” or “relaxed”. In addition to this I also created the Heart Rate (HR) graphs, which showed a slight difference between those who played the dark and light maps, with a small increase on those who played the dark map between their base HR and the average after completing the level, and a less noticeable, or even a decrease once playing the map with no lighting.