Abstract
Researchers interested in emotions have endeavored to elicit emotional responses in the laboratory and have determined that films were one of the most effective ways to elicit emotions. The present study presented the development of a new standardized emotional film database for Asian culture. There were eight kinds of emotion: fear, disgust, anger, sadness, neutrality, surprise, amusement, and pleasure. Each kind included eight film clips, and a total of 64 emotional films were viewed by 110 participants. We analyzed both the subjective experience (valence, arousal, motivation, and dominance) and physiological response (heart rate and respiration rate) to the presentation of each film. The results of the subjective ratings indicated that our set of 64 films successfully elicited the target emotions. Heart rate declined while watching high-arousal films compared to neutral ones. Films that expressed amusement elicited the lowest respiration rate, whereas fear elicited the highest. The amount and category of emotional films in this database were considerable. This database may help researchers choose applicable emotional films for study according to their own purposes and help in studies of cultural differences in emotion.
Highlights
IntroductionEmotion has always been a popular research topic, and a large range of procedures have been used to elicit emotions in the laboratory, such as pictures (e.g., Lang et al, 1999), words (e.g., Bradley and Lang, 1999), music (e.g., Sutherland et al, 1982), facial expressions (e.g., Ekman et al, 1983), imagination (e.g., Lang, 1979), films (e.g., Gross and Levenson, 1995), social interactions (e.g., Ax, 1953) and hypnosis (e.g., Bower et al, 1983)
We asked the participants use one word to describe the type of emotion of each film
We counted the number of times each word was used as a descriptor as the hit rate
Summary
Emotion has always been a popular research topic, and a large range of procedures have been used to elicit emotions in the laboratory, such as pictures (e.g., Lang et al, 1999), words (e.g., Bradley and Lang, 1999), music (e.g., Sutherland et al, 1982), facial expressions (e.g., Ekman et al, 1983), imagination (e.g., Lang, 1979), films (e.g., Gross and Levenson, 1995), social interactions (e.g., Ax, 1953) and hypnosis (e.g., Bower et al, 1983). Films can elicit the three main components of emotional responses: the subjective experience, behavior (including facial expression) and physiological responses (Scott, 1930; Sternbach, 1962; Averill, 1969; McHugo et al, 1982; Rottenberg et al, 2007)
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