Causing Fear, Suspense, and Anxiety Using Sound Design in Computer Games - Game Sound Technology and Player Interaction: Concepts and Developments - page 179

reacts and provides feedback to the brain, which
unconsciously appraises the body's reaction and
influences further cognition. For instance, if the
player jumps due to a stimulus, the mind may at-
tribute that bodily action to being scared. Research
by Wolfson and Case (2000) showed that louder
sounds in a computer game increased heart rate
and impacted physiological arousal and attention.
According to the James-Lange perspective, the
player may unconsciously attribute increased heart
rate and arousal as a state of fear and/or anxiety.
The game designer can use this knowledge to
his or her advantage. Loud and sudden noises, for
example, can make players instinctively jump,
which promotes the feeling of fear. However, it is
less clear how to use this perspective for eliciting
anxiety. If players sweat profusely while playing a
game, will he or she attribute that to fear or anxiety
or something else? Perhaps the answer depends
on the stimuli, which leads some researchers
back to the Darwinian and cognitive perspectives
of emotions, where Darwinians believe that our
emotional reactions to stimuli are innate and
cognitivists believe that they are learned.

Fear and anxiety responses to particular stimuli
are learned through conditioning from family and
other valued persons, which, in turn, are part of
the larger general culture (May, 1977). Social-
constructivists believe that emotions are used to
maintain interpersonal relationships and identity
in a person's communities (Greeno, Collins, &
Resnick, 1996). The community can be friends,
relatives, or other game players, who are all
influenced by the general culture. For instance,
people often feel scared when they suddenly see a
cockroach because that is what they have learned
from their mothers, who feared and loathed cock-
roaches. If they did not feel fear, but rather liked
cockroaches, their relationship with their mothers
may have become strained, which, at a young
age, would not be desirable. Thus, these youths
appropriate the feeling of fear of cockroaches
from their mothers, who, in turn, maintain this
fear because it is part of the cultural milieu in
which the mothers desired to participate. Finally,
as Cunningham, Grout, and Picking (2011) point
out, the social and cultural milieu includes the
context in which the person is experiencing his
or her emotion. Thus, emotions that emerge while
playing games (that is, gameplay emotions) are
different from everyday emotions because the
context of playing games is not the same as the
context of typical everyday experiences.
For game designers, this means that anything
that the player has been taught to fear can be lev-
eraged to promote fear, including such things as
death and failure, which are risks (to the player's
avatar) in most computer games. Furthermore,
game designers can use sound effects as cues for
threats. For example, if a player gets close to an
electrical hazard, the game designer can add a
loud sparking noise to scare the player. However,
game designers must keep in mind that particular
graphics and sound may elicit different or less
intense emotions between individuals in different
cultures. For instance, the sound of a slide-action
shotgun pumping may promote more fear or

The Social Constructivist
Perspective of Emotions

Are our reactions to particular stimuli innate or
learned? If learned, how can game designers know
what stimuli to use to promote fear and anxiety?
Although there is some controversy regarding
the answer to the former question, there do seem
to be a few, select stimuli that innately promote
fear such as sudden, unexpected movements,
especially approach-motions, or sounds (Gebeke,
1993) and, for anxiety, the threatened security
patterns between an individual and his or her
valued significant persons (May, 1977). However,
beyond that, it would seem that our reactions to
particular events or stimuli are learned, and this
leads to the question of how and what is learned.
The response to this is best answered by the
social constructivist perspective of emotions.