Emotion and Techniques of Propaganda in YouTube Videos

Objectives: This study aims to comprehend relationships between YouTube video elements—the techniques of propaganda and people’s emotions, and simultaneously discover influences of video elements in each emotion. Methods/Statistical Analysis: Kansei Engineering has been established as being compatible to be applied for the purpose of understanding human emotions and psychology, thus this study employs this approach by using 30 Kansei Words, adopted from PANAS-X emotional descriptors. 10 YouTube videos were selected as stimulus, and Partial Least Square (PLS) analysis was executed to identify those relationships. Findings: From the results obtained, it is evident that the techniques of propaganda element in YouTube videos conjure people’s emotion that could affect unity. Firstly, in order to analyse design requirements, PLS was executed to identify relationships between emotion and video elements that could affect people’s unity. It is also used to discover the influence of video elements in each emotion, the best and worst value for each video element, and the kind of emotion elicited by each specimen, so as to counter such propaganda video. Secondly, the PLS Range of each emotion was calculated to determine the influence of video elements to emotion. The calculation of Range allows the identification of element/design influence, the good element, as well as the bad element. Finally, the result from the PLS scores are used to compose the propaganda element/design requirement. The propaganda element/design elements included in the guideline are the components that have high influence (for each ‘Category’) in eliciting each Kansei/emotion. Application/ Improvements: The result provides insights to people’s emotional response towards propaganda videos and how the techniques affect the emotional responses. This could then be used as a guide to designing counter-propaganda videos that embed targeted responses by the people.

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