Benefits of emotional design in multimedia instruction

• Control group studied slideshow on viruses with printed text and line drawings.
• Enhanced group had color drawings showing virus and host cell with human-like faces.
• Enhanced group outscored control group on a learning test.
• Multimedia learning can be improved by implementing emotional design principles.

Emotional design of multimedia instruction involves making the essential elements in the lesson's graphics more appealing, such as by rendering them with human-like features and with distinct, appealing colors (Um, Plass, Hayward, & Homer, 2012). College students received an 8-slide multimedia lesson on how a virus causes a cold for 5 min (Experiment 1) or for as long as they wanted (Experiment 2). For the control group, the graphics consisted of simple black-and-white drawings in which the host cell was represented as a large circle, and the virus was represented as a small circle with small spikes on the outside and a rectangle on the inside. For the enhanced group, the graphics were redrawn to render the host cell as a red face with expressive eyes (registering surprise, fear, and sickness at various stages in the process), and the virus as a blue face with fierce eyes and with a green dot at the end of each of the blue tentacles surrounding the virus face. The enhanced group performed better than the control group on a subsequent learning test (d = 0.69 in Experiment 1, d = 0.65 in Experiment 2) and gave higher effort ratings in Experiment 1 (d = 0.65) but not in Experiment 2 (d = −0.10). The findings are generally consistent with the cognitive affective theory of learning with media, and point to the importance of incorporating motivation into cognitive theories of multimedia learning.