Exploration of the Characteristics of Emotion Distribution in Korean TV Series: Common Pattern and Statistical Complexity

The series is one of the most popular formats of television programs, but the emotional aspects of its content have not attracted much attention from researchers. Furthermore, the cinemetric approach, in which move data are quantitively examined, has not been used to analyze affective content in television series. Therefore, this study focused on emotion distribution in Korean television series. In all, 337 episodes from 20 series were divided into shots, then keyframes were selected from the shots. Facial emotions on the keyframes were measured using an online artificial intelligence service. Emotion distributions were obtained from each episode and then were observed for common patterns. In addition, the statistical complexity of the distributions were calculated and compared by the temporal phase of the episode, channel type, genre, ratings, and season. The results show that the emotion distributions of all episodes in all series had the same form: an asymmetric U-shaped distribution biased toward zero. The statistical complexity of emotion distribution was greater in early episodes than in later episodes of a series, and it was higher in episodes with higher ratings. In addition, the complexity of emotion distribution was higher in hard genres and during the summer season. There was no significant difference between terrestrial television channels and cable/general programming channels.