Analysis Method for Audience’s Emotional Changes During Watching Movies

The realization of effective information transfer through stories (success of stories) will greatly contribute to the development of human society. Previous studies that have analyzed the success of movies, which are one type of stories, have shown that the emotional experience given to the audience by movies may be related to the success of the movies. In this previous study, emotional arcs were used as a method to analyze the emotional experiences of movie audience. However, the emotional arcs in the previous study can only analyze the emotional arousal intended by the movie creator and does not take into account the actual emotional experiences of the audience. To solve this problem, it is necessary to devise an appropriate method of analyzing the emotional experience of the audience for application to existing methods of analyzing the success of movies. Therefore, in this study, we extracted and analyzed the emotional changes of movie audiences during watching movies using heart rate variability as an analysis of the emotional experiences of the movie audience. As a result, the emotional changes of the movie audience analyzed by the method in this study could be effectively incorporated into existing methods for analyzing the success of movies, for example, by contrasting them with the emotional arousal intended by the creators.