Emotion and attention: predicting electrodermal activity through video visual descriptors

Abstract

This paper contributes to the field of affective video content analysis through the novel employment of electrodermal activity (EDA) measurements as ground truth for machine learning algorithms. The variation of the electrical properties of the skin, known as EDA, is a psychophysiological indicator widely used in medicine, psychology and neuroscience which can be considered a somatic marker of the emotional and attentional reaction of subjects towards stimuli. One of its main advantages is that the recorded information is not biased by the cognitive process of giving an opinion or a score to characterize the subjective perception. In this work, we predict the levels of emotion and attention, derived from EDA records, by means of a small set of low-level visual descriptors computed from the video stimuli. Linear regression experiments show that our descriptors predict significantly well the sum of emotion and attention levels, reaching a coefficient of determination R2 = 0.25. This result sets a promising path for further research on the prediction of emotion and attention from videos using EDA.