Emotional Engagement

The degree to which a user connects emotionally with content, characters, and narrative, experiencing feelings such as excitement, tension, empathy, humor, or sadness in response to the media. In accessibility research on audio-described webtoons, emotional engagement is a dimension of immersion that measures how effectively the audio experience evokes emotional responses comparable to those intended by the visual storytelling. Overlapping audio effect placement achieves the highest emotional engagement scores because simultaneous narration and sound effects create a cohesive emotional experience. Professional voice acting also contributes more to emotional engagement than AI-generated TTS, though hybrid approaches can balance quality with cost.