Loneliness Assuaged: Eye-Tracking an Audience Watching Barrage Videos

Summary

The study proposes an activation-match model to study how loneliness is mitigated when a lonely audience watches barrage videos of rational and emotional appeals. The protocol uses eye tracking to document duration and fixation, accounting for the degree of satisfaction when emotional needs are appeased by content and barrage.

Abstract

Researchers usually theorize media exposure based on assumptions of legacy media. However, a new interactive video viewing format, in this case barrage video where viewers’ comments are overlaid over visual content, challenges past perspectives. This study proposes an activation and match satisfaction model to study viewing behaviors of lonely people and to challenge previous claims. It presents a protocol to examine the mechanism of how loners use barrage videos by combining eye tracking and self-report measures. Eye tracking documents the audience's conscious and subconscious watching behaviors in real time and allows for inference of the amount of allocated cognitive resources in response to rational and emotional content. The self-report gauges the amount of satisfaction obtained. Overall, results from the measures supported an activation and match satisfaction model regarding loners and their barrage video viewing behaviors. Implications are discussed.

Introduction

Eye-tracking technique
The eye is often referred to as a window of the mind^1,2. Eighty percent of human information intake is obtained visually³. Since the 19th century, people began to study human psychological activities by directly observing eye movements of participants. Miles invented the peephole to make observations when participants read⁴. In the study, the experimenter sat opposite a participant and observed the participant’s eye movements through a small hole in the middle of the reading material. Since then, technology has vastly i....

Protocol

This protocol adheres to the Jinan University research guidelines. As only the medical school of the university has an IRB board, no other discipline is required to have IRB approvals. However, the researchers confirm that all ethical rules and regulations were followed. The project did not pose any physical or psychological harm to participants.

1. Participant screening for the experiment

1. Recruit native Chinese speakers from a southern Chinese university with normal or corrected-to-normal vision and no hearing impairments nor psychiatric history.
2. Measure loneliness using the third edition of the UCLA scale

Results

Repeated measures MANOVAs were conducted using duration and fixation as dependent variables, which indicated attention. Results confirmed proposed hypotheses that lonely participants’ gaze stayed on barrage longer than on non-barrage areas when the emotional ads were present. However, when the rational ads were viewed, there was no difference. Such data pattern did not replicate for the low loneliness participants, whose attention remained statistically non-significant when watching emotional ads and rational ads. That i.......

Discussion

In this study, eye tracking technology and self-reports are combined to test the validity of the proposed AMSM model. Previous studies mainly used self-reports to explore the relationship between loneliness and media use at the mercy of participants’ ability to articulate. These offline methods fail to understand the psychological processes while watching barrage videos. In this study, eye tracking technology was used to record duration and fixation so researchers could reliably infer how much cognitive resources t.......

Materials

List of materials used in this article

Name	Company	Catalog Number	Comments
eyetracker	Tobii	T60
questionnaire