Preliminary Materials Toward a Library of Affective Films (LAF): Standardization and Psychophysiological Validation

Abstract

Abstract

Most emotion-elicitation film libraries use only self-report measures (e.g., Hagemann et al., 1999) and even those including physiological data (e.g., Gross & Levenson, 1995) often fail to control for variables such as simulation or familiarity. The current study introduces a new film stimulus set relatively free of narrative elements, and uniquely validated using dynamic self-reporting and six psychophysiological measures. Twenty-five healthy normal Auburn University students watched 16 short film clips while wearing electrodes to track autonomic changes while continuously indicating changes in their emotional valence and arousal. The films classify into three groups roughly corresponding to high, low, and neutral valence. Average valence and arousal were correlated with changes in autonomic activity, such as decreases in parasympathetic measures that correlated with increases in subjective arousal. These findings represent an initial attempt to develop and validate an affective film stimulus set with novel, temporally-synced, distinct autonomic and behavioral signatures.