The Effect of Media on a Person’s Ability to Accurately Read Emotions

Emotional Intelligence is, in a way, your level of compassion: how well you can monitor one’s emotions and plan accordingly. This experiment was conducted to determine whether a 5-minute video displaying a strong emotion would affect how a person would do on the Well Quiz-a multiple choice quiz where you choose an emotion out of the 4 answers based on what you see in the picture. Two groups of 18 students watched two separate videos and then completed the Well Quiz. There results were then compared to one group of 18 students that had completed the Well Quiz without watching a video. One video was meant to display a more sad emotion, while the other showed happiness. Trials were conducted via a google forms being sent out to three different groups: Sophomores, Juniors, and Seniors. All data from the forms was recorded onto Google Sheets, where graphs were made via Google Sheets. Overall, while Group 3, the Seniors had the highest score overall, there was not a significant difference between the groups that watched videos and the group that did not, so the null hypothesis failed to be rejected (p=0.82). Future studies could include Boy vs Girls, people over the age of 25, and seeing how the groups would do if the videos were switched around