Full throttle: Demonstrating the speed, accuracy, and validity of a new method for continuous two-dimensional self-report and annotation

DynAMoS: The Dynamic Affective Movie Clip Database for Subjectivity Analysis

In this paper, we describe the design, collection, and validation of a new video database that includes holistic and dynamic emotion ratings from 83 participants watching 22 affective movie clips. In contrast to previous work in Affective Computing, which pursued a single "ground truth" label for the affective content of each moment of each video (e.g., by averaging the ratings of 2 to 7 trained participants), we embrace the subjectivity inherent to emotional experiences and provide the full distribution of all participants' ratings (with an average of 76.7 raters per video). We argue that this choice represents a paradigm shift with the potential to unlock new research directions, generate new hypotheses, and inspire novel methods in the Affective Computing community. We also describe several interdisciplinary use cases for the database: to provide dynamic norms for emotion elicitation studies (e.g., in psychology, medicine, and neuroscience), to train and test affective content analysis algorithms (e.g., for dynamic emotion recognition, video summarization, and movie recommendation), and to study subjectivity in emotional reactions (e.g., to identify moments of emotional ambiguity or ambivalence within movies, identify predictors of subjectivity, and develop personalized affective content analysis algorithms). The database is made freely available to researchers for noncommercial use at https://dynamos.mgb.org.

Valence, sensations and appraisals co-occurring with feeling moved: evidence on kama muta theory from intra-individually cross-correlated time series

Emotional experiences typically labelled "being moved" or "feeling touched" may belong to one universal emotion. This emotion, which has been labelled "kama muta", is hypothesised to have a positive valence, be elicited by sudden intensifications of social closeness, and be accompanied by warmth, goosebumps and tears. Initial evidence on correlations among the kama muta components has been collected with self-reports after or during the emotion. Continuous measures during the emotion seem particularly informative, but previous work allows only restricted inferences on intra-individual processes because time series were cross-correlated across samples. In the current studies, we instead use a within-subject design to replicate and extend prior work. We compute intra-individual cross-correlations between continuous self-reports on feeling moved and (1) positive and negative affect; (2) goosebumps and subjective warmth and (3) appraisals of closeness and morality. Results confirm the predictions of kama muta theory that feeling moved by intensified communal sharing cross-correlates with appraised closeness, positive affect, warmth and (less so) goosebumps, but not with negative affect. Contrary to predictions, appraised morality cross-correlated with feeling moved as much as appraised closeness did. We conclude that strong inferences on emotional processes are possible using continuous measures, replace earlier findings, and are largely in line with theorising.