Modeling Reader's Emotional State Response on Document's Typographic Elements

We present the results of an experimental study towards modeling the reader’s emotional state variations induced by the typographic elements in electronic documents. Based on the dimensional theory of emotions we investigate how typographic elements, like font style (bold, italics, bold-italics) and font (type, size, color and background color), affect the reader’s emotional states, namely, Pleasure, Arousal, and Dominance (PAD). An experimental procedure was implemented conforming to International Affective Picture System guidelines and incorporating the Self-Assessment Manikin test. Thirty students participated in the experiment. The stimulus was a short paragraph of text for which any content, emotion, and/or domain dependent information was excluded. The Analysis of Variance revealed the dependency of (a) all the three emotional dimensions on font size and font/background color combinations and (b) the Pleasure dimension on font type and font style. We introduce a set of mapping rules showing how PAD vary on the discrete values of font style and font type elements. Moreover, we introduce a set of equations describing the PAD dimensions’ dependency on font size. This novel model can contribute to the automated reader’s emotional state extraction in order, for example, to enhance the acoustic rendition of the documents, utilizing text-to-speech synthesis.