5. General discussion
The purpose of this research was to replicate and extend
research on the emotional design of multimedia materials and the
efficacy of emotional design to facilitate learning. The Um et al.
(2011) study found initial evidence supporting a facilitation hy-
pothesis for emotional design: The positive emotional design
variant was able to induce positive emotions in learners and
resulted in higher comprehension performance and higher transfer
performance. The authors also found that learners using the posi-
tive emotional design variant perceived these materials as less
difficult, invested more mental effort in processing of the content,
and reported higher levels of motivation, satisfaction, and percep-
tion toward the learning materials than learners receiving the
neutral design variant. Study 1 was designed to provide a baseline
for Study 2 and to verify whether findings by Um et al. (2011) could
also be found with a different population and different mood in-
duction procedure, and to determine which specific positive emo-
tions were impacted by mood induction versus emotional design.
Study 2 was designed to investigate the individual and joined
contribution of color and shape as emotional design elements to
facilitating comprehension and transfer in science learning. To that
end, we designed two new variants of the multimedia materials
that separately incorporated the emotional design modifications
for color and for shape, as discussed above, and used the variant
with neutral design as controls.
The present research was partially able to replicate these find-
ings of Um et al. (2011) with a sample from a different population.
Across both studies, the positive emotional design variant of the
multimedia learning materials did induce positive emotion in
learners; further, this design-induced positive emotional state was
sustained throughout the learning task. Results of Study 2 clarify
this finding, demonstrating, as a large effect, that round shapes