Does the emotional stance of human and virtual instructors in instructional videos affect learning processes and outcomes?

This study investigates the positivity principle – the idea that people respond more positively and learn better from an instructor who displays positive emotion than from an instructor who displays negative emotion – and the equivalence hypothesis – the idea that learners respond similarly to the emotional tone displayed by both human and virtual instructors. In this between-subjects design experiment, participants viewed one of eight instructional videos on binomial probability, varying in the emotion portrayed by the voice and gestures of an onscreen instructor and varying in whether the instructor was human or virtual. Participants either saw a positive instructor (happy or content) or a negative instructor (bored or frustrated) and that instructor was either human or virtual. In support of the positivity principle, participants recognized the positive or negative emotional tone of the instructor, felt a similar emotion to the instructor, and had more favorable social connection ratings for positive instructors. However, the positivity of the instructor did not impact how well participants performed on a delayed posttest. In support of the equivalence hypotheses, all of these effects were found for both human and virtual instructors. Overall, this study provided support for three of the four links in the positivity principle, and showed that the principle applied to both human and virtual instructors as per the equivalence hypothesis.