Continuous Arousal Self-assessments Validation Using Real-time Physiological Responses

On one hand, the fact that Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) is highly correlated with the user affective arousal provides the possibility to apply GSR in emotion detection. On the other hand, temporal correlation of real-time GSR and self-assessment of arousal has not been well studied. This paper confronts two modalities representing the induced emotion when watching 30 movies extracted from the LIRIS-ACCEDE database. While continuous arousal annotations have been self-assessed by 5 participants using a joystick, real-time GSR signal of 13 other subjects is supposed to catch user emotional response, objectively without user's interpretation. As a main contribution, this paper introduces a method to make possible the temporal comparison of both signals. Thus, temporal correlation between continuous arousal peaks and GSR were calculated for all 30 movies. A global Pearson's correlation of 0.264 and a Spearman's rank correlation coefficient of 0.336 were achieved. This result proves the validity of using both signals to measure arousal and draws a reliable framework for the analysis of such signals.