Emotional Arousal and Valence and the Effects of Civic Education

The paper discusses the influence of FaceReader-coded emotional arousal and valence on the effectiveness of civic education. The experimental design allowed the authors to observe relationships between emotional responsiveness and memorisation, attitude change, and prosocial behaviour. In the study with 90 adult participants, we video-recorded facial expressions while watching three parallel versions of a narrative on anti-communist opposition in Poland. The analysis of collected data suggested that emotional arousal is associated with prosocial behaviour and the valence of signalling with an attitude change, while cognitive effects are not related to emotional responsiveness. Moreover, civic education depends on the triad of emotions: sadness, happiness, and disgust.