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Journal ArticleDOI

Assessing the effectiveness of a large database of emotion-eliciting films : a new tool for emotion researchers

05 Oct 2010-Cognition & Emotion (ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD)-Vol. 24, Iss: 7, pp 1153-1172
TL;DR: In this article, the authors developed and tested the effectiveness of a new and comprehensive set of emotional film excerpts and found that the film clips were effective with regard to several criteria such as emotional discreteness, arousal, positive and negative affect.
Abstract: Using emotional film clips is one of the most popular and effective methods of emotion elicitation. The main goal of the present study was to develop and test the effectiveness of a new and comprehensive set of emotional film excerpts. Fifty film experts were asked to remember specific film scenes that elicited fear, anger, sadness, disgust, amusement, tenderness, as well as emotionally neutral scenes. For each emotion, the 10 most frequently mentioned scenes were selected and cut into film clips. Next, 364 participants viewed the film clips in individual laboratory sessions and rated each film on multiple dimensions. Results showed that the film clips were effective with regard to several criteria such as emotional discreteness, arousal, positive and negative affect. Finally, ranking scores were computed for 24 classification criteria: Subjective arousal, positive and negative affect (derived from the PANAS; Watson & Tellegen, 1988), a positive and a negative affect scores derived from the Differential Emotions Scale (DES; Izard et al., 1974), six emotional discreteness scores (for anger, disgust, sadness, fear, amusement and tenderness), and 15 “mixed feelings” scores assessing the effectiveness of each film excerpt to produce blends of specific emotions. In addition, a number of emotionally neutral film clips were also validated. The database and editing instructions to construct the film clips have been made freely available in a website.
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Results show the potential uses of the recorded modalities and the significance of the emotion elicitation protocol and single modality and modality fusion results for both emotion recognition and implicit tagging experiments are reported.
Abstract: MAHNOB-HCI is a multimodal database recorded in response to affective stimuli with the goal of emotion recognition and implicit tagging research. A multimodal setup was arranged for synchronized recording of face videos, audio signals, eye gaze data, and peripheral/central nervous system physiological signals. Twenty-seven participants from both genders and different cultural backgrounds participated in two experiments. In the first experiment, they watched 20 emotional videos and self-reported their felt emotions using arousal, valence, dominance, and predictability as well as emotional keywords. In the second experiment, short videos and images were shown once without any tag and then with correct or incorrect tags. Agreement or disagreement with the displayed tags was assessed by the participants. The recorded videos and bodily responses were segmented and stored in a database. The database is made available to the academic community via a web-based system. The collected data were analyzed and single modality and modality fusion results for both emotion recognition and implicit tagging experiments are reported. These results show the potential uses of the recorded modalities and the significance of the emotion elicitation protocol.

1,162 citations


Cites background from "Assessing the effectiveness of a la..."

  • ...Psychologists recommended videos from 1 to 10 minutes long for elicitation of a single emotion [17], [18]....

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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The experiment results show that neural signatures associated with different emotions do exist and they share commonality across sessions and individuals, and the performance of deep models with shallow models is compared.
Abstract: To investigate critical frequency bands and channels, this paper introduces deep belief networks (DBNs) to constructing EEG-based emotion recognition models for three emotions: positive, neutral and negative. We develop an EEG dataset acquired from 15 subjects. Each subject performs the experiments twice at the interval of a few days. DBNs are trained with differential entropy features extracted from multichannel EEG data. We examine the weights of the trained DBNs and investigate the critical frequency bands and channels. Four different profiles of 4, 6, 9, and 12 channels are selected. The recognition accuracies of these four profiles are relatively stable with the best accuracy of 86.65%, which is even better than that of the original 62 channels. The critical frequency bands and channels determined by using the weights of trained DBNs are consistent with the existing observations. In addition, our experiment results show that neural signatures associated with different emotions do exist and they share commonality across sessions and individuals. We compare the performance of deep models with shallow models. The average accuracies of DBN, SVM, LR, and KNN are 86.08%, 83.99%, 82.70%, and 72.60%, respectively.

1,131 citations


Cites background from "Assessing the effectiveness of a la..."

  • ...The existing studies have already evaluated the reliability and efficiency of film clips to elicitation [50], [51]....

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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A heuristic individual differences framework is proposed and research on three sequential components of flexibility for which propensities and abilities vary are reviewed: sensitivity to context, availability of a diverse repertoire of regulatory strategies, and responsiveness to feedback.
Abstract: People respond to stressful events in different ways, depending on the event and on the regulatory strategies they choose. Coping and emotion regulation theorists have proposed dynamic models in which these two factors, the person and the situation, interact over time to inform adaptation. In practice, however, researchers have tended to assume that particular regulatory strategies are consistently beneficial or maladaptive. We label this assumption the fallacy of uniform efficacy and contrast it with findings from a number of related literatures that have suggested the emergence of a broader but as yet poorly defined construct that we refer to as regulatory flexibility. In this review, we articulate this broader construct and define both its features and limitations. Specifically, we propose a heuristic individual differences framework and review research on three sequential components of flexibility for which propensities and abilities vary: sensitivity to context, availability of a diverse repertoire of regulatory strategies, and responsiveness to feedback. We consider the methodological limitations of research on each component, review questions that future research on flexibility might address, and consider how the components might relate to each other and to broader conceptualizations about stability and change across persons and situations.

910 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The results over a population of 24 participants demonstrate that user-independent emotion recognition can outperform individual self-reports for arousal assessments and do not underperform for valence assessments.
Abstract: This paper presents a user-independent emotion recognition method with the goal of recovering affective tags for videos using electroencephalogram (EEG), pupillary response and gaze distance. We first selected 20 video clips with extrinsic emotional content from movies and online resources. Then, EEG responses and eye gaze data were recorded from 24 participants while watching emotional video clips. Ground truth was defined based on the median arousal and valence scores given to clips in a preliminary study using an online questionnaire. Based on the participants' responses, three classes for each dimension were defined. The arousal classes were calm, medium aroused, and activated and the valence classes were unpleasant, neutral, and pleasant. One of the three affective labels of either valence or arousal was determined by classification of bodily responses. A one-participant-out cross validation was employed to investigate the classification performance in a user-independent approach. The best classification accuracies of 68.5 percent for three labels of valence and 76.4 percent for three labels of arousal were obtained using a modality fusion strategy and a support vector machine. The results over a population of 24 participants demonstrate that user-independent emotion recognition can outperform individual self-reports for arousal assessments and do not underperform for valence assessments.

582 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: It is proposed that emotions are represented in the somatosensory system as culturally universal categorical somatotopic maps, and maps of bodily sensations associated with different emotions using a unique topographical self-report method.
Abstract: Emotions are often felt in the body, and somatosensory feedback has been proposed to trigger conscious emotional experiences. Here we reveal maps of bodily sensations associated with different emotions using a unique topographical self-report method. In five experiments, participants (n = 701) were shown two silhouettes of bodies alongside emotional words, stories, movies, or facial expressions. They were asked to color the bodily regions whose activity they felt increasing or decreasing while viewing each stimulus. Different emotions were consistently associated with statistically separable bodily sensation maps across experiments. These maps were concordant across West European and East Asian samples. Statistical classifiers distinguished emotion-specific activation maps accurately, confirming independence of topographies across emotions. We propose that emotions are represented in the somatosensory system as culturally universal categorical somatotopic maps. Perception of these emotion-triggered bodily changes may play a key role in generating consciously felt emotions.

540 citations


Cites background from "Assessing the effectiveness of a la..."

  • ...Given the inherent difficulties associated with eliciting anger and surprise with movie stimuli (37), these emotions were excluded from the study....

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References
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Two 10-item mood scales that comprise the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) are developed and are shown to be highly internally consistent, largely uncorrelated, and stable at appropriate levels over a 2-month time period.
Abstract: In recent studies of the structure of affect, positive and negative affect have consistently emerged as two dominant and relatively independent dimensions. A number of mood scales have been created to measure these factors; however, many existing measures are inadequate, showing low reliability or poor convergent or discriminant validity. To fill the need for reliable and valid Positive Affect and Negative Affect scales that are also brief and easy to administer, we developed two 10-item mood scales that comprise the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS). The scales are shown to be highly internally consistent, largely uncorrelated, and stable at appropriate levels over a 2-month time period. Normative data and factorial and external evidence of convergent and discriminant validity for the scales are also presented.

34,482 citations


"Assessing the effectiveness of a la..." refers background or methods in this paper

  • ...Negative affect (Watson et al., 1988): Subject-level means and standard deviations....

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  • ...This enabled us to assess the film set using a tool consistent with a dimensional approach of emotions (e.g., Davidson, 1992, 1993; Lang et al., 1993; Plutchik, 1980; Russell, 1980; Watson et al., 1988)....

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  • ...Positive affect (Watson et al., 1988): Subject-level means and standard deviations....

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  • ...The PANAS scales were used because they can assess two independent factors of positive and negative affect (Watson et al., 1988)....

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  • ...…derived from a dimensional approach of emotions, in which emotional states are thought to be organised along generic continuous dimensions rather than discrete basic emotions (e.g., Davidson, 1992, 1993; Lang, Greenwald, Bradley, & Hamm, 1993; Plutchik, 1980; Russell, 1980; Watson et al., 1988)....

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Journal ArticleDOI

12,519 citations


"Assessing the effectiveness of a la..." refers background or methods in this paper

  • ...In fact, a significant proportion of emotion research uses parameters derived from a dimensional approach of emotions, in which emotional states are thought to be organised along generic continuous dimensions rather than discrete basic emotions (e.g., Davidson, 1992, 1993; Lang, Greenwald, Bradley, & Hamm, 1993; Plutchik, 1980; Russell, 1980; Watson et al., 1988)....

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  • ...This enabled us to assess the film set using a tool consistent with a dimensional approach of emotions (e.g., Davidson, 1992, 1993; Lang et al., 1993; Plutchik, 1980; Russell, 1980; Watson et al., 1988)....

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  • ...Next we also measured subjective arousal, which taps another important COGNITION AND EMOTION, 2010, 24 (7) 1155 emotional dimension (Lang et al., 1993; Russell, 1980; Sonnemans & Frijda, 1995)....

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  • ...…derived from a dimensional approach of emotions, in which emotional states are thought to be organised along generic continuous dimensions rather than discrete basic emotions (e.g., Davidson, 1992, 1993; Lang, Greenwald, Bradley, & Hamm, 1993; Plutchik, 1980; Russell, 1980; Watson et al., 1988)....

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Book
01 Jan 1991
TL;DR: In this article, the authors discuss the person-environment relationship: motivation and coping Cognition and emotion Issues of causality, goal incongruent (negative) emotions Goal congruent (positive) and problematic emotions.
Abstract: Part I: BACKGROUND: About emotion Issues of research, classification and measurements Part II: THE COGNITIVE-MOTIVATIONAL-RELATIONAL THEORY: The person-environment relationship: motivation and coping Cognition and emotion Issues of causality Part III: INDIVIDUAL EMOTIONS: Goal incongruent (negative) emotions Goal congruent (positive) and problematic emotions Part IV: EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT: Individual development Social influence Part V: PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS: Emotions and health Implications for research, assessment, treatment and disease prevention References Index.

8,565 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This work has shown that not only the intensity of an emotion but also its direction may vary greatly both in the amygdala and in the brain during the course of emotion regulation.
Abstract: Emotions are viewed as having evolved through their adaptive value in dealing with fundamental life-tasks. Each emotion has unique features: signal, physiology, and antecedent events. Each emotion ...

7,167 citations


"Assessing the effectiveness of a la..." refers background or methods in this paper

  • ...The database of stimuli can be found at this URL: http://nemo.psp.ucl.ac.be/FilmStim/....

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  • ...…the first four categories was motivated by the assumptions: (a) that they cover the negative states most commonly accepted as being ‘‘basic emotions’’ (Ekman, 1984, 1992; Izard, 1991); (b) that they are often studied in emotion research; and (c) that they refer to verbal labels easy to understand…...

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  • ...For instance, Ekman (1984, 1992) suggested that there are six basic emotions: happiness, surprise, fear, sadness, anger and disgust....

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  • ...The DES was used to assess discrete emotional states in order to check whether the film stimuli could trigger differentiated emotional feeling states consistent with a basic emotions approach (Ekman, 1984, 1992; Izard, 1991)....

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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Reappraisal decreased disgust experience, whereas suppression increased sympathetic activation, suggesting that these 2 emotion regulatory processes may have different adaptive consequences.
Abstract: Using a process model of emotion, a distinction between antecedent-focused and response-focused emotion regulation is proposed. To test this distinction, 120 participants were shown a disgusting film while their experiential, behavioral, and physiological responses were recorded. Participants were told to either (a) think about the film in such a way that they would feel nothing (reappraisal, a form of antecedent-focused emotion regulation), (b) behave in such a way that someone watching them would not know they were feeling anything (suppression, a form of response-focused emotion regulation), or (c) watch the film (a control condition). Compared with the control condition, both reappraisal and suppression were effective in reducing emotion-expressive behavior. However, reappraisal decreased disgust experience, whereas suppression increased sympathetic activation. These results suggest that these 2 emotion regulatory processes may have different adaptive consequences.

3,778 citations


"Assessing the effectiveness of a la..." refers background in this paper

  • ...Second, it has been widely observed that film excerpts can elicit strong subjective and physiological changes (e.g., Frazier, Strauss, & Steinhauer, 2004; Gross, 1998; Palomba, Sarlo, Angrilli, Mini, & Stegagno, 2000)....

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