Effects of Immersive Media on Emotion and Memory: An Experiment Comparing Article, 360-video, and Virtual Reality

Fields such as immersive journalism and VR-based media consumption are expected to holistically engross users and have a deeper emotional impact as well as internationalization of information. We used a between-subjects repeated-measures experiment (N = 87) to study the effects of a 360-degree video presented in three levels of immersiveness. High and medium immersion (VR-360 and Screen-360) presented the original video using different technology, whereas low immersion (Article) represented video content in the form of a transcript and video stills. The results suggest that the higher immersiveness has a more prominent effect on the emotional response of consumers. Moreover, higher negative affect after the media experience appears to be associated seems to predict with lower cued recall memory of the presented content. When it comes to individual differences, age in the range of 18-40 years does not seem to influence the strength of the affect change but females might experience a higher change than males. This study suggests caution when creating informational but highly emotional immersive media content as the negative emotional experience might impede memory of factual information. These implications are further applicable to fields other than journalism, such as education and simulation training.