The learners receiving the positive emotional design, on the other
hand, experienced higher valence of emotions such as inspired and
interested, and their perception of the task difficulty decreased, and
motivation increased. These learners focused on the details of the
information presented and were able to produce them on the
comprehension test, but they were not able to develop deep mental
models that resulted in higher transfer performance. These results
also show that our comprehension and transfer tests were able to
discriminate different types of knowledge. The comprehension test
asked for specific definitions of terms, whereas the transfer test
asked learners to apply their knowledge to answer questions
related to the big ideas, not to specific details. Our results suggest
that emotions resulting from different mood induction methods
may impact comprehension and transfer differently.
After at least partially replicating findings from Um et al. (2011)
with a new population, we next asked whether the effect of our
positive emotional design that was comprised of multiple effects
can be decomposed; i.e., we ask which individual design elements
may induce positive emotions. Specifically, we were interested in
the unique contributions of color and shape as emotional design
elements in impacting emotions, learning outcomes and affective
outcomes.