The Sentic Mouse: Developing a tool for Measuring Emotional Valence

This paper provides a discussion of the results from three experimental studies on emotion and presents a new experiment inspired by them that is a rst step toward designing a tool to measure a subject s valenced response Peter J Lang and oth ers showed subjects a series of pictures and asked them to self rate their emotional response Ward Winton Lois Putnam and Robert Krauss measured heart rate and skin conductance while subjects viewed emotionally evocative stimuli Dr Manfred Clynes conducted a series of sentic experiments gathering data from the vertical and horizontal components of nger pressure Each of these experiments attempted to quantify emotions and map them into a predictive model of emotion theory Under the auspices of a ective computing these three models are applied to the interaction between humans and computers Using a computer to provide the a ective stimulus to the human subject an experiment is conducted which combines all three emotion studies An ordinary computer mouse was augmented with a sensor to collect sentic data as in Dr Clynes experiments Subjects were hooked up to various other bio sensors as in the Winton Putnam and Krauss tests and viewed the a ective picture database from Lang s work The three measured results sentic data heart rate and self assessment are then readily compared against each other as well as the theory predicted results and the valence for each slide The results show that a strong cor relation between the self reported valence assessment of our subjects and the results from Lang s numerous experiments exists The data collected from the sentic mouse also signi cantly correlated to the self reported information Valence information can be captured by the sentic mouse Thesis Supervisor Rosalind W Picard Title Associate Professor Thesis Supervisor Whitman A Richards Title Professor Media Arts Sciences