Visual context in biological life cycle diagrams is associated with elevated empathy

Diagrams are widely used in educational, instructional, and communication contexts, however affective responses to diagrams with the potential to influence motivation, learning, and behavior, have been overlooked. This paper presents a mixed-methods study, employing focus groups ( N  = 17) and a survey experiment ( N  = 194) to examine how visual context (a contextual background scene) in biological life cycle diagrams impacts affective responses. Results showed that the inclusion of visual context led to a modest increase in associative/affective empathy ( T (191)  = 1.943, p  = .027, d  = 0.281). These findings demonstrate that visual design choices during the development of instructional graphics can have an impact on affective responses, in this case associative/affective empathy, with potentially important implications for education and communication settings.