Dubbed vs. subtitled emotional content. Measuring viewers’ emotions when watching a film

Film viewing elicits several emotions from the viewer with information displayed by both the auditory and visual channels (Zupan and Eskritt 2020). When audiovisual content is translated and consumed with dubs or subs, emotions still need to travel across cultures and be effectively transmitted in the target language. To date, the cognitive and evaluative processing of dubbing as compared to subtitling has been explored by a number of studies (Wissmath et al. 2009, Perego et al. 2015, Perego et al. 2016, Matamala et al. 2017, Perego et al. 2018) in order to observe any differences in how these transfer methods are assessed and received by the audience. Overall, results point to a similar cognitive experience and an equally positive response to both dubbed and subtitled material. Even though available research has shown that these audiovisual translation (AVT) modes seem to preserve the way a film is understood and appreciated, empirical studies exploring the emotional effects of dubbing vs. subtitling on a foreign audience are still scarce. With the aim of filling this gap, the present work investigates the role of the AVT mode (dubbing vs. subtitling) in viewers’ facial expressions and gaze behaviour when watching emotionally loaded scenes. Eight different clips featuring two emotions of opposing valence (negative and positive) were selected and presented to a group of (native Spanish) participants with dubbed or subtitled dialogues in Spanish. Viewers’ facial expressions and eye-movements were analysed as indicators of emotional and scanning behaviour. Preliminary results show that the viewers’ emotional response could be partially altered by the transfer mode selected to watch a film and that gaze behaviour could be slightly affected by emotional valence.