Comparing affective responses to standardized pictures and videos: A study report

Multimedia documents such as text, images, sounds or videos elicit emotional responses of different polarity and intensity in exposed human subjects. These stimuli are stored in affective multimedia databases. The problem of emotion processing is an important issue in Human-Computer Interaction and different interdisciplinary studies particularly those related to psychology and neuroscience. Accurate prediction of users' attention and emotion has many practical applications such as the development of affective computer interfaces, multifaceted search engines, video-on-demand, Internet communication and video games. To this regard we present results of a study with N=10 participants to investigate the capability of standardized affective multimedia databases in stimulation of emotion. Each participant was exposed to picture and video stimuli with previously determined semantics and emotion. During exposure participants' physiological signals were recorded and estimated for emotion in an off-line analysis. Participants reported their emotion states after each exposure session. The a posteriori and a priori emotion values were compared. The experiment showed, among other reported results, that carefully designed video sequences induce a stronger and more accurate emotional reaction than pictures. Individual participants' differences greatly influence the intensity and polarity of experienced emotion.