E-MOVIE - Experimental MOVies for Induction of Emotions in neuroscience: An innovative film database with normative data and sex differences

Testing a brief attention training protocol to prevent emotional distress from a fear induction procedure

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES

Attentional hypervigilance to threat in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is an important topic to investigate. Efforts to leverage attention training to prevent PTSD have been promising but underlying mechanisms have not been fully elucidated. The current study tested whether Attention Bias Modification (ABM) prior to an emotion induction of fear could reduce self-reported fear and arousal compared to two control conditions.

METHODS

Participants (N = 86) were recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk and randomized to receive either (1) ABM where they were directed towards fear related words on every trial; (2) Attention Control Training (ACT) where they were directed towards fear related words on 50% of trials; or (3) Neutral training where all words were neutral. Participants then completed a fear emotion induction (a 2-min video), reporting fear, arousal, and mood before and after the emotion induction.

RESULTS

Participants in the ABM condition had lower fear compared to the Neutral condition b = 11.43, 95% CI (1.20, 21.65), d = 0.48. Participants in the ABM condition did not have lower fear compared to the ACT condition b = 9.75, 95% CI (-0.64, 19.96), d = 0.41. Importantly, attentional avoidance at baseline moderated the effect of condition for both fear and arousal; higher avoidance at baseline for the ABM condition was associated with lower fear and arousal after the emotion induction compared to the Neutral condition.

LIMITATIONS

The sample size was relatively small and limited in diversity.

CONCLUSIONS

These findings are the first experimental evidence showing that the benefit of ABM prior to a fearful experience may be in its reduction of the target emotion. Additionally, ABM may work best for those that demonstrate the most avoidance at baseline in their attention towards fearful stimuli.

Contactless Electrostatic Piloerection for Haptic Sensations

In this project, we create artificial piloerection using contactless electrostatics to induce tactile sensations in a contactless way. Firstly, we design various high-voltage generators and evaluate them in terms of their static charge, safety and frequency response with different electrodes as well as grounding strategies. Secondly, a psychophysics user study revealed which parts of the upper body are more sensitive to electrostatic piloerection and what adjectives are associated with them. Finally, we combine an electrostatic generator to produce artificial piloerection on the nape with a head-mounted display, this device provides an augmented virtual experience related to fear. We hope that work encourages designers to explore contactless piloerection for enhancing experiences such as music, short movies, video games, or exhibitions.

Gender differences in the effects of emotion induction on intertemporal decision-making

'Good things come to those who wait' is a popular saying, which goes along with numerous daily life decisions requiring trade-offs between immediate-small and later-larger rewards; however, some individuals have a tendency to prefer sooner rewards while discounting the value of delayed rewards, known as delay discounting. The extant literature indicates that emotions and gender can modulate intertemporal choices, but their interplay remains hitherto poorly investigated. Here, 308 participants were randomized to different conditions, inducing distinct emotions-fear, joy, a neutral state-through standardized movie clips, and then completed a computerized delay discounting task for hypothetical money rewards. Following the induction of fear, women discount the future steeper than men, thus preferring immediate-smaller rewards rather than larger-delayed ones. Also, women were more prone to choose immediate rewards when in a fearful condition than when in a positive state of joy/happiness. By contrast, men were unaffected by their emotional state when deciding on monetary rewards. Our findings provide evidence that fear can trigger different intertemporal choices according to gender, possibly reflecting the adoption of different evolutionary strategies.

Detection of arousal and valence from facial expressions and physiological responses evoked by different types of stressors

Automatically detecting mental state such as stress from video images of the face could support evaluating stress responses in applicants for high risk jobs or contribute to timely stress detection in challenging operational settings (e.g., aircrew, command center operators). Challenges in automatically estimating mental state include the generalization of models across contexts and across participants. We here aim to create robust models by training them using data from different contexts and including physiological features. Fifty-one participants were exposed to different types of stressors (cognitive, social evaluative and startle) and baseline variants of the stressors. Video, electrocardiogram (ECG), electrodermal activity (EDA) and self-reports (arousal and valence) were recorded. Logistic regression models aimed to classify between high and low arousal and valence across participants, where "high" and "low" were defined relative to the center of the rating scale. Accuracy scores of different models were evaluated: models trained and tested within a specific context (either a baseline or stressor variant of a task), intermediate context (baseline and stressor variant of a task), or general context (all conditions together). Furthermore, for these different model variants, only the video data was included, only the physiological data, or both video and physiological data. We found that all (video, physiological and video-physio) models could successfully distinguish between high- and low-rated arousal and valence, though performance tended to be better for (1) arousal than valence, (2) specific context than intermediate and general contexts, (3) video-physio data than video or physiological data alone. Automatic feature selection resulted in inclusion of 3-20 features, where the models based on video-physio data usually included features from video, ECG and EDA. Still, performance of video-only models approached the performance of video-physio models. Arousal and valence ratings by three experienced human observers scores based on part of the video data did not match with self-reports. In sum, we showed that it is possible to automatically monitor arousal and valence even in relatively general contexts and better than humans can (in the given circumstances), and that non-contact video images of faces capture an important part of the information, which has practical advantages.

How Male and Female Literary Authors Write About Affect Across Cultures and Over Historical Periods

A wealth of literature suggests the existence of sex differences in how emotions are experienced, recognized, expressed, and regulated. However, to what extent these differences result from the put in place of stereotypes and social rules is still a matter of debate. Literature is an essential cultural institution, a transposition of the social life of people but also of their intimate affective experiences, which can serve to address questions of psychological relevance. Here, we created a large corpus of literary fiction enriched by authors' metadata to measure the extent to which culture influences how men and women write about emotion. Our results show that even though before the twenty-first century and across 116 countries women more than men have written about affect, starting from 2000, this difference has diminished substantially. Also, in the past, women's narratives were more positively laden and less arousing. While the difference in arousal is ubiquitous and still present nowadays, sex differences in valence vary as a function of culture and have dissolved in recent years. Altogether, these findings suggest that historic evolution is associated with men and women writing similarly about emotions and reveal a sizable impact of culture on the affective characteristics of the lexicon.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-023-00219-9.

The physiological measurement and evaluation of empathy of video content

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a surge in video content consumption, but measuring viewers' empathy towards the content has been limited to subjective evaluations or attached physiological apparatus. In this study, we introduced a novel non-contact physiological method for measuring empathy towards video content by assessing the synchronization of facial micromovements between the subject and object (i.e., person) within the media. We recorded facial micromovements and heart rate variability (HRV) remotely using a camera while 62 subjects watched one video each, designed and validated to elicit one of four two-dimensional emotions: pleasant-aroused, pleasant-relaxed, unpleasant-aroused, and unpleasant-relaxed. We also collected the subjects' self-assessed emotions and empathy using a questionnaire. The results confirmed that the stimuli effectively induced the intended arousal in the subjects, as evidenced by both self-reported emotions and HRV responses that suggested higher arousal was associated with stronger activity in the sympathetic nervous system. A closer examination of HRV indicators, such as SDNN and Total Power values, showed an amplification during the unpleasant state. We interpret this as the body's dynamic response to stressors, underlining the autonomic nervous system's proactive role in responding to such stimuli. In a broader context, our results emphasized that while subjects showcased augmented empathy during aroused conditions, the introduction of stressors, represented by unpleasant content, led to a dampening of this empathetic response. This findings demonstrate the potential of non-contact physiological methods for measuring empathy toward video content.

Thinking about it: the impact of COVID-19-related stimuli on prospective memory

Background

Since 2020, information regarding COVID-19 has been a constant presence in the news, in our conversations and thoughts. Continuous exposure to this type of stimuli could have an impact on cognitive processes essential for our everyday activities, such as prospective memory (PM). PM is the ability to remember to perform an intention at a specific point in the future, like remembering to take prescribed medicines at a specific time or to turn off the stove after cooking. Do COVID-related stimuli affect our ability to perform a PM task?

Methods

To answer this question, we proposed a novel version of the classical paradigm used to investigate PM. Namely, this paradigm includes a baseline condition, in which an ongoing task is presented alone, and a PM condition in which the same task is proposed again together with a second (prospective) task. In this study, a short video clip was presented between the baseline and the PM condition. The video clip displayed either neutral, negative, or COVID-related content. Additionally, participants were asked to respond to two questionnaires and a series of questions regarding their well-being and experience with the pandemic. Namely, the DASS-21 scale (evaluating depression, anxiety, and stress), and the COVID-19-PTSD questionnaire (a questionnaire evaluating post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms related to the pandemic experience) were administered. Participants' performance and responses were analyzed using a linear mixed effect (LME) model approach, and correlation analyses were run to highlight possible correlations between participants' scores in the DASS-21, the COVID-19-PTSD, and the additional questions on their personal experience with the pandemic.

Results

The LME models revealed significant effects of the displayed video on performance: in line with previous studies, the clip displaying standard negative contents led to impaired accuracy in the ongoing task in the PM condition, compared to the Baseline. In contrast, participants who saw the COVID-related clip showed improved accuracy in the ongoing task compared to the other participants, selectively in the block performed after the video clip was displayed (PM condition). Furthermore, the explanatory power of the LME model calculated on accuracy to the ongoing trials was enhanced by the inclusion of the scores in the anxiety subscale of the DASS-21, suggesting a detrimental role of anxiety. Altogether, these results indicate a different effect of the exposure to classical negative contents (associated with a cost in terms of accuracy in the ongoing task between the baseline and the PM condition) and the pandemic-related one, which was instead characterized by a higher accuracy to ongoing trials compared to the other video clips. This counterintuitive finding seems to suggest that COVID-related stimuli are processed as "acute stressors" rather than negative stimuli, thus inducing a state of increased alertness and responsivity.

Affective norms for emotional ambiguity in valence, origin, and activation spaces

We introduce the first tool to measure the emotional ambiguity on three bivariate spaces: valence (dimensions of positivity and negativity); origin (automaticity and reflectiveness); and activation (subjective significance and arousal). Our database consists of 2650 word stimuli, assessed by 1380 participants in total with the usage of Self-Assessment Manikin scales for each dimension. We show that the ambiguity of valence, origin, and activation may be successfully perceived and reported in a behavioral procedure. The study has allowed us to compute characteristics of each word for every emotional dimension, thus providing the category of intensity of ambiguity (low, moderate, or high). We also studied the curvilinear relationships between the dimensions. Possible usage, specifics, and limitations of our database are discussed.

Mood effects on semantic processes: Behavioural and electrophysiological evidence

Mood (i.e., our current background affective state) often unobtrusively yet pervasively affects how we think and behave. Typically, theoretical frameworks position it as an embodied source of information (i.e., a biomarker), activating thinking patterns that tune our attention, perception, motivation, and exploration tendencies in a context-dependent manner. Growing behavioural and electrophysiological research has been exploring the mood–language interactions, employing numerous semantics-oriented experimental paradigms (e.g., manipulating semantic associations, congruity, relatedness, etc.) along with mood elicitation techniques (e.g., affectively evocative film clips, music, pictures, etc.). Available behavioural and electrophysiological evidence has suggested that positive and negative moods differently regulate the dynamics of language comprehension, mostly due to the activation of mood-dependent cognitive strategies. Namely, a positive mood has been argued to activate global and heuristics-based processing and a negative mood – local and detail-oriented processing during language comprehension. Future research on mood–language interactions could benefit greatly from (i) a theoretical framework for mood effects on semantic memory, (ii) measuring mood changes multi-dimensionally, (iii) addressing discrepancies in empirical findings, (iv) a replication-oriented approach, and (v) research practices counteracting publication biases.

A Review of AI Cloud and Edge Sensors, Methods, and Applications for the Recognition of Emotional, Affective and Physiological States

Affective, emotional, and physiological states (AFFECT) detection and recognition by capturing human signals is a fast-growing area, which has been applied across numerous domains. The research aim is to review publications on how techniques that use brain and biometric sensors can be used for AFFECT recognition, consolidate the findings, provide a rationale for the current methods, compare the effectiveness of existing methods, and quantify how likely they are to address the issues/challenges in the field. In efforts to achieve the key goals of Society 5.0, Industry 5.0, and human-centered design better, the recognition of emotional, affective, and physiological states is progressively becoming an important matter and offers tremendous growth of knowledge and progress in these and other related fields. In this research, a review of AFFECT recognition brain and biometric sensors, methods, and applications was performed, based on Plutchik's wheel of emotions. Due to the immense variety of existing sensors and sensing systems, this study aimed to provide an analysis of the available sensors that can be used to define human AFFECT, and to classify them based on the type of sensing area and their efficiency in real implementations. Based on statistical and multiple criteria analysis across 169 nations, our outcomes introduce a connection between a nation's success, its number of Web of Science articles published, and its frequency of citation on AFFECT recognition. The principal conclusions present how this research contributes to the big picture in the field under analysis and explore forthcoming study trends.

Comparison of Slides and Video Clips as Different Methods for Inducing Emotions: An Electroencephalographic Alpha Modulation Study

Films, compared with emotional static pictures, represent true-to-life dynamic stimuli that are both ecological and effective in inducing an emotional response given the involvement of multimodal stimulation (i.e., visual and auditory systems). We hypothesized that a direct comparison between the two methods would have shown greater efficacy of movies, compared to standardized slides, in eliciting emotions at both subjective and neurophysiological levels. To this end, we compared these two methods of emotional stimulation in a group of 40 young adults (20 females). Electroencephalographic (EEG) Alpha rhythm (8–12 Hz) was recorded from 64 scalp sites while participants watched (in counterbalanced order across participants) two separate blocks of 45 slides and 45 clips. Each block included three groups of 15 validated stimuli classified as Erotic, Neutral and Fear content. Greater self-perceived arousal was found after the presentation of Fear and Erotic video clips compared with the same slide categories. sLORETA analysis showed a different lateralization pattern: slides induced decreased Alpha power (greater activation) in the left secondary visual area (Brodmann Area, BA, 18) to Erotic and Fear compared with the Neutral stimuli. Instead, video clips elicited reduced Alpha in the homologous right secondary visual area (BA 18) again to both Erotic and Fear contents compared with Neutral ones. Comparison of emotional stimuli showed smaller Alpha power to Erotic than to Fear stimuli in the left precuneus/posterior cingulate cortex (BA 7/31) for the slide condition, and in the left superior parietal lobule (BA 7) for the clip condition. This result matched the parallel analysis of the overlapped Mu rhythm (corresponding to the upper Alpha band) and can be interpreted as Mu/Alpha EEG suppression elicited by greater motor action tendency to Erotic (approach motivation) compared to Fear (withdrawal motivation) stimuli. Correlation analysis found lower Alpha in the left middle temporal gyrus (BA 21) associated with greater pleasantness to Erotic slides (r38 = –0.62, p = 0.009), whereas lower Alpha in the right supramarginal/angular gyrus (BA 40/39) was associated with greater pleasantness to Neutral clips (r38 = –0.69, p = 0.012). Results point to stronger emotion elicitation of movies vs. slides, but also to a specific involvement of the two hemispheres during emotional processing of slides vs. video clips, with a shift from the left to the right associative visual areas.

Development of an affective database made of interactive virtual environments

Despite the great potential of Virtual Reality (VR) to arouse emotions, there are no VR affective databases available as it happens for pictures, videos, and sounds. In this paper, we describe the validation of ten affective interactive Virtual Environments (VEs) designed to be used in Virtual Reality. These environments are related to five emotions. The testing phase included using two different experimental setups to deliver the overall experience. The setup did not include any immersive VR technology, because of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, but the VEs were designed to run on stereoscopic visual displays. We collected measures related to the participants’ emotional experience based on six discrete emotional categories plus neutrality and we included an assessment of the sense of presence related to the different experiences. The results showed how the scenarios can be differentiated according to the emotion aroused. Finally, the comparison between the two experimental setups demonstrated high reliability of the experience and strong adaptability of the scenarios to different contexts of use.

Physiological correlates of subjective emotional valence and arousal dynamics while viewing films

An exploration of the physiological correlates of subjective emotional states has theoretical and practical significance. Previous studies have reported that subjective valence and arousal correspond to facial electromyography (EMG) and electrodermal activity (EDA), respectively, across stimuli. However, the reported results were inconsistent, no study investigated subjective-physiological concordance across time, and measures of arousal remain controversial. To investigate these issues, while healthy adults (n = 20) viewed emotional films, we assessed overall and continuous ratings of valence and arousal and recorded EMG from the corrugator supercilii and zygomatic major, EDA from the palms and forehead, and nose-tip temperature. The corrugator and zygomatic EMG were negatively and positively associated with valence ratings, respectively, across stimuli and time. EDA (both sites) and nose-tip temperature were positively and negatively associated with arousal ratings, respectively, across stimuli and time. It is concluded that subjective emotional valence and arousal dynamics have specific physiological correlates.

Toward Emotion Recognition From Physiological Signals in the Wild: Approaching the Methodological Issues in Real-Life Data Collection

Emotion, mood, and stress recognition (EMSR) has been studied in laboratory settings for decades. In particular, physiological signals are widely used to detect and classify affective states in lab conditions. However, physiological reactions to emotional stimuli have been found to differ in laboratory and natural settings. Thanks to recent technological progress (e.g., in wearables) the creation of EMSR systems for a large number of consumers during their everyday activities is increasingly possible. Therefore, datasets created in the wild are needed to insure the validity and the exploitability of EMSR models for real-life applications. In this paper, we initially present common techniques used in laboratory settings to induce emotions for the purpose of physiological dataset creation. Next, advantages and challenges of data collection in the wild are discussed. To assess the applicability of existing datasets to real-life applications, we propose a set of categories to guide and compare at a glance different methodologies used by researchers to collect such data. For this purpose, we also introduce a visual tool called Graphical Assessment of Real-life Application-Focused Emotional Dataset (GARAFED). In the last part of the paper, we apply the proposed tool to compare existing physiological datasets for EMSR in the wild and to show possible improvements and future directions of research. We wish for this paper and GARAFED to be used as guidelines for researchers and developers who aim at collecting affect-related data for real-life EMSR-based applications.

EEG gamma activity to emotional movies in individuals with high traits of primary "successful" psychopathy

This study aimed to investigate emotional alterations in a community sample with primary psychopathic traits. Sixty males selected from a larger sample and divided in two groups, High (HP) and Low (LP) primary Psychopathy, watched 15 validated emotional movies divided in five categories (Erotic, Neutral, Fear, and the new Scenery and Compassion). Subjective responses and cortical activity in the EEG Gamma band (30-49 Hz) were recorded. Concerning self-reports, HP participants felt less anxious and anguished in response to Fear clips and less sad, touched and anguished by Compassion excerpts. Negative clips induced larger EEG Gamma activity in both groups compared to neutral and erotic movies, but Gamma activity to Fear movies was reduced in HP. This group showed also a small cortical response to positive Scenery movies, at the level of the Neutral ones. Source analysis showed in HP participants a reduced cortical activation to Fear in a large brain network, comprising the right prefrontal and temporal cortices and bilateral inferior parietal cortex. Results showed that primary psychopathy, in addition to the impaired response to Fear, was associated with a reduced response also to other specific categories of emotional stimuli, suggesting an altered affect on a broader scale.