ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Perception Science
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1674489
The emotional perception and cognitive processing during multimedia learning in students with depressive tendencies
Provisionally accepted
- 1Shandong Provincial Key Laboratory of Brain Science and Mental Health, Jinan, China
- 2Faculty of Psychology, Shandong Normal University, Jinan, China
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Abstract: The impact of emotional design of pedagogical agent on learners' emotional perception and cognitive processing is the research focus in multimedia learning studies. While pedagogical agent's positive emotion facilitates learning among healthy students, how the pedagogical agent's emotion influences the emotional perception and cognitive processing in students with depressive tendencies remains unclear. This study investigated this issue by presenting emotional cues through both visual (facial expression) and auditory (voice tone) channels to students with depressive tendencies. Results found that learners perceived the negative emotion but not the positive emotion conveyed by the pedagogical agent's facial expression, supporting Beck's cognitive theory of depression. Compared to negative voice tone, positive voice tone enhanced the social connection between learners and the pedagogical agent, aligning with the positivity principle and emotional contagion theory. In addition, when the pedagogical agent's emotions across visual and auditory channels was congruent (both positive or negative), learners exhibited increased germane cognitive load and improved performance on transfer tests, supporting the congruency effect. Therefore, for learners with depressive tendencies, multimedia designers should prioritize auditory emotional cue and utilize the emotional congruency effect across channels to facilitate learner's emotional perception and cognitive processing.
Keywords: Emotional perception, cognitive processing, Visual channel, Auditory channel, Students with Depressive Tendencies, eye-tracking technology
Received: 28 Jul 2025; Accepted: 25 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Wang, Wang, Liu, Liu and Cui. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Lei Cui, Faculty of Psychology, Shandong Normal University, Jinan, China
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