Player-Game Interaction Through Affective Sound - Game Sound Technology and Player Interaction: Concepts and Developments - page 267

and presence before discussing empirical studies
and theoretical stratagems for measuring player
immersion as aided by game sound. Once we can
understand under what sonic conditions immer-
sion arises, we can then design more precisely
for immersion.

tion of a certain emotion is likely to influence the
psychophysiological reaction. This theory already
tries to account for a combination of cognitive
and physiological factors when experiencing
emotions, in which case an emotion is not purely
physiological (i.e. it is separate from mental pro-
cessing). Another important emotional concept is
the two-factor theory of emotions which is based
on empirical observations (Schachter & Singer,
1962) and considers emotions to arise from the
interaction of two factors: cognitive labeling and
physiological arousal (Schachter, 1964). In this
theory, cognition is used as a framework within
which individual feelings can be processed and
labeled, giving the state of physiological arousal
positive or negative values according to the situ-
ation and past experiences. These theories have
spawned modern emotion research in neurology
and psychophysiology (Damasio, 1994; Lang,
1995; LeDoux, 1998; Panksepp, 2004) which
is gathering evidence for a strong connection
between affective and cognitive processing as
underlying factors of emotion in line with the
definition of Norman (2004) which we initially
provided.

tHEOrIEs OF EMOtION

Psychophysiological research, affective neurosci-
ence as well as affective and emotive computing
are supporting the assumption that a user's (or
in our case a player's) affective state can be
measured by sensing brain and body responses
to experienced stimuli (Nacke, 2009). Emotions
in this sense can be seen as psychophysiological
processes, which are evoked by sensation, percep-
tion, or interpretation of an event and/or object
which is referred to in psychology as a stimulus.
A stimulus usually entails physiological changes,
cognitive processing, subjective feeling, or general
changes in behaviour. This is of general interest,
since playing games includes all sorts of virtual
events taking place in virtual environments con-
taining virtual objects.
Emotions blur the boundaries between physi-
ological and mental states, being associated with
feelings, behaviours and thoughts. No definitive
taxonomy has been worked out for emotions,
but several ways of classifying emotions have
been used in the past. One of the first and most
prominent theories of emotion is the James-
Lange theory, which states that emotion follows
from experiencing physiological alterations: The
change of an outside stimulus (either event or
object) causes the physiological change which
then generates the emotional experience (James,
1884; Lange, 1912).
The Cannon-Bard theory offered an alterna-
tive explanation of the processing sequence of
emotions, stating that, after an emotion occurs, it
evokes a certain behaviour based on the processing
of the emotion (Cannon, 1927). Thus, the percep-

From Emotions to Experience

Modern emotion research typically uses one of
two taxonomies which try to account for emotions
as either consisting of a combination of a few
fundamental emotions or as comprising different
dimensions usually demarked by extreme char-
acteristics on the ends of the dimensional scales:

1. Emotions comprise a set of basic emotions .
In the vein of Darwin (1899) who observed
fundamental characteristic expressive move-
ments, gestures, and sounds), researchers
like Ekman (1992) and Plutchik (2001)
argue for a set of basic discrete emotions,
such as fear, anger, joy, sadness, acceptance,
disgust, expectation, and surprise. Each basic
emotion can be correlated to an individual