What is it about?
Diagrams are widely used to explain biological processes, such as animal or plant life cycles, but they are usually designed with a focus on scientific accuracy and with little regard for how people feel when they view them. Using a combination of focus groups and a survey experiment, we examined how people interpret and respond emotionally to biological life-cycle diagrams with and without a natural background scene (visual context), and found that diagrams with contextual backgrounds were associated with increased feelings of empathy towards the organisms being shown.
Featured Image
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Diagrams are often treated as neutral tools, but this research shows that even small design choices can influence how people feel and engage with scientific information. The findings suggest that visual design choices might encourage certain emotional responses—in this case empathy—which may in turn support other important outcomes such as motivation, learning, and engagement. This work is timely as educators, designers, and communicators increasingly seek ways to make science more engaging and socially meaningful without compromising accuracy. By highlighting the emotional dimension of diagram design, the study opens new possibilities for more thoughtful and effective visual communication.
Perspectives
We were surprised by clear differences in emotional responses to different diagram designs in early qualitative explorations. Confirming these relationships with quantitative data was a challenging piece of research, as it involved the highly complex processes of individual emotional response formation to complex visual stimuli. We are very pleased to have been able to demonstrate the existence of a relationship and hope this opens the door to a new perspective on diagram research.
Matthew Wood
Queensland University of Technology
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Visual context in biological life cycle diagrams is associated with elevated empathy, Information Design Journal, February 2026, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/idj.25002.woo.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
