The psychophysiological impact of audio described porn

Abstract

Research on audio description (AD) has undergone an enormous development in the last decade. Unfortunately, little attention has been devoted to the social, psychological and emotional factors influencing AD, one exception being the recent line of research which empirically explores the emotional reception of AD (Ramos & Rojo, 2014; Ramos, 2015, 2016) and the influence of psychological factors in its production phase (Ramos & Rojo, 2020). Results from these studies satisfactorily prove that audio described films are capable of evoking a similar emotional response to that elicited by their audiovisual counterparts, especially for scenes inducing disgust and fear, and that reception and production depend largely on film typology. The purpose of this new study is to analyse whether the audio described version of porn scenes can also offer its audience a similar experience to that provided by the original audiovisual scenes. Forty-seven sighted and visually impaired women (mean age = 25.12) took part in the experiment. The sample was divided into two groups: 25 sighted women watched the original audiovisual version of the clips, whereas 22 visually impaired women listened to the audio described version. Participants’ emotional response was analysed by a combination of an indicator of autonomic activation (heart rate, HR,) and self-report measures. Our results indicate that audio described porn films are capable of eliciting a similar response in both blind and sighted audiences to the one evoked by original audiovisual scenes.