Emotion management and highly interactivity video games: Examining emotion change in relation to arousal, involvement, and enjoyment

The purposes of this study were to examine the role of interactivity within video games on the emotion change process, and the association among enjoyment, arousal, involvement and emotion change. The researcher predicted that highly interactive video game players would experience more arousal, involvement and enjoyment than low interactive video game players, and thus a greater emotion management effect would be found with the highly interactive video game than the low interactive video game. Furthermore, enjoyment would be associated with involvement and arousal in the highly interactive video game condition. Gaming performance was assumed to be correlated with enjoyment and emotion change. The participants were recruited for several undergraduate classes at FSU, and randomly assigned to one of the three interactivity conditions (Wii gaming, Flash gaming, and DVD watching).;The results demonstrated that (1) interactivity within video games influences the overall emotion management effect, (2) only highly interactive video gamers can simultaneously increase positive affects and decrease negative affects, (3) highly interactive video games produce the greatest arousal, involvement and enjoyment out of the three conditions, (4) two affect-related components, arousal and involvement are correlated with an increase in positive affect, (5) enjoyment is correlated with an increase in positive affect, (6) enjoyment is correlated with arousal, involvement and gaming performance, and (7) gaming performance is correlated with a change in both positive and negative affect.