Vibration to upper body manipulates joyful experience while viewing emotional scenes

Vibration stimulation to the upper body enhances the subjective experience during viewing audio-visual content. However, the reported types of enhanced experience vary among previous studies. In this study, we investigated the types of experiences that were enhanced or diminished by vibratory stimuli to the upper body. In an experiment involving seven participants, eight hugging scenes were viewed, each of which evoked different impressions. For some randomly selected videos, participants were presented vibratory stimuli. After viewing the videos, participants scored the hugging scenes using ten adjectives. Vibration affected the feeling of joy for three out of eight videos. A hug scene of a father and his son after a long separation felt more joyful with the vibration. A hug scene of a family during a hospital stay due to illness felt less joyful with the vibration. The results will provide an effective way to enhance the experience of audio-visual contents using vibratory stimuli.