Effects of Synchronized Seat-Integrated Vibrotactile Feedback on Emotional Experience and EEG Responses During Audiovisual Emotion Induction: A Controlled Human-Participant Study

Audience-centered haptic technologies have attracted increasing attention as a means of enhancing emotional engagement during audiovisual experiences, but wearable devices can be difficult to deploy in large-scale public environments. This study proposes a synchronized seat-integrated vibrotactile system based on voice-coil actuators that delivers tactile feedback through a conventional seating structure without direct body attachment. Data from 127 participants in a between-subject experiment were analyzed to compare audiovisual-only (AV) and audiovisual-plus-haptic (AVH) conditions across 50 emotion-elicitation videos. Subjective self-assessment and electroencephalography (EEG) were analyzed using linear mixed-effects models. No significant overall AVH–AV effect was identified for any of the eight subjective measures after false discovery rate (FDR) correction, and no condition-by-emotion omnibus test, interaction contrast, or within-emotion AVH–AV contrast was statistically reliable after correction. EEG showed no statistically reliable overall haptic effect, condition-by-emotion interaction, or within-emotion AVH–AV effect after FDR correction. In contrast, emotion category significantly affected 120 of 287 EEG features, and 408 of 1148 marginal emotion contrasts remained significant. Null findings remain conditional on unmeasured tactile delivery and perception. A post-experiment questionnaire from 48 AVH participants suggested that most perceived vibration but did not verify tactile delivery for all participants or quantify body-seat vibration.