Aesthetic Highlight Detection in Movies Based on Synchronization of Spectators’ Reactions.

Detection of aesthetic highlights is a challenge for understanding the affective processes taking place during movie watching. In this paper we study spectators’ responses to movie aesthetic stimuli in a social context. Moreover, we look for uncovering the emotional component of aesthetic highlights in movies. Our assumption is that synchronized spectators’ physiological and behavioral reactions occur during these highlights because: (i) aesthetic choices of filmmakers are made to elicit specific emotional reactions (e.g. special effects, empathy and compassion toward a character, etc.) and (ii) watching a movie together causes spectators’ affective reactions to be synchronized through emotional contagion. We compare different approaches to estimation of synchronization among multiple spectators’ signals, such as pairwise, group and overall synchronization measures to detect aesthetic highlights in movies. The results show that the unsupervised architecture relying on synchronization measures is able to capture different properties of spectators’ synchronization and detect aesthetic highlights based on both spectators’ electrodermal and acceleration signals. We discover that pairwise synchronization measures perform the most accurately independently of the category of the highlights and movie genres. Moreover, we observe that electrodermal signals have more discriminative power than acceleration signals for highlight detection

A Connotative Space for Supporting Movie Affective Recommendation

The problem of relating media content to users’affective responses is here addressed. Previous work suggests that a direct mapping of audio-visual properties into emotion categories elicited by films is rather difficult, due to the high variability of individual reactions. To reduce the gap between the objective level of video features and the subjective sphere of emotions, we propose to shift the representation towards the connotative properties of movies, in a space inter-subjectively shared among users. Consequently, the connotative space allows to define, relate and compare affective descriptions of film videos on equal footing. An extensive test involving a significant number of users watching famous movie scenes, suggests that the connotative space can be related to affective categories of a single user. We apply this finding to reach high performance in meeting user’s emotional preferences

Affective Recommendation of Movies Based on Selected Connotative Features

The apparent difficulty in assessing emotions elicited by movies and the undeniable high variability in subjects emotional responses to filmic content have been recently tackled by exploring film connotative properties: the set of shooting and editing conventions that help in transmitting meaning to the audience. Connotation provides an intermediate representation which exploits the objectivity of audiovisual descriptors to predict the subjective emotional reaction of single users. This is done without the need of registering users physiological signals neither by employing other people highly variable emotional rates, but just relying on the inter-subjectivity of connotative concepts and on the knowledge of users reactions to similar stimuli. This work extends previous by extracting audiovisual and film grammar descriptors and, driven by users rates on connotative properties, creates a shared framework where movie scenes are placed, compared and recommended according to connotation. We evaluate the potential of the proposed system by asking users to assess the ability of connotation in suggesting filmic content able to target their affective requests

Emotions in archetypal media content

Emotion is an intriguing and mysterious psychological phenomenon. While everyone seems to know what it is, researchers have not yet come to consensus on its definition, and many questions still remain unanswered. While the nature of emotion is yet to discover, the design community has noticed is importance, and poses the challenge of how emotion could inform design. We see the necessity to follow the state of the art in psychology and initiate the undertaking by exploring the emotional qualities in various types of media content. The first part of this thesis aims at constructing a theoretical framework. Recent years have seen empirical studies suggest that emotion could be unconscious. While this is to be further justified, scientists are motivated to reconsider current theories of emotion to account for this phenomenon. In light of this, we integrate these studies about unconscious emotion into our literature review. An overview from theory to practice is illustrated to provide a reference for viewing the current states in application domains, such as affective computing and emotional design. This review offers a holistic understanding about emotion from various perspectives, which allow us to look for new directions in future studies. Based on our review, we see a promising direction by applying psychoanalysis methods to analyze the media content as affective stimuli, and these stimuli can be evaluated by using quantitative measures to investigate the connection between the content and the corresponding emotions. The analysis on the media content is based on a psychoanalysis theory¿the theory of archetypes¿proposed by Carl Jung. He argues that there exists a universal pattern in humans¿ unconscious thoughts, which can be manifested as symbolic content in various forms of narratives, such as myth and fairy tales. Today, this archetypal symbolic content can be seen in modern media, particularly in movies. By applying the Jungian approach, we analyzed the symbolic meaning in movie scenes and edit these feature scenes into a collection of archetypal media content, which serve as the experimental materials for later explorations. In the second part of this thesis, we present three experimental studies that aim at determining if archetypal media content can be differentiated based on emotional responses. We adopted the psychoanalytical approach described earlier to collect feature scenes in movies as archetypal media content. Meanwhile, affective stimuli of explicit emotions are also included as benchmarks for comparison, such as sadness and joy. Self-reports and physiological signals are both adopted for measuring emotional responses. These three studies follow similar experimental design: presenting stimuli and measuring emotion concurrently. The results of these studies confirm that emotions induced by archetypal content are different from explicit emotions, and the statistical analysis further indicate that the predictive model obtained from physiological signals outperforms the model generated from self-reports while viewing archetypal media content. These results, however, are opposite to the results gained from affective stimuli of explicit emotions, leading us to the conclusion that archetypal media content might induce unconscious emotions, and physiological signals are more effective than self-reports for recognizing emotions induced by archetypal media content.La emoción es un fenómeno psicológico intrigante y misterioso. Aunque todo el mundo parece saber lo que es, los investigadores aún no han llegado a un consenso sobre su definición, y todavía quedan muchas preguntas sin respuesta. Si bien la naturaleza de las emociones está aún por descubrir, la comunidad de profesionales del diseño ha entendido su importancia, y se plantea el desafío de interrelacionar ambos mundos, explorando de las cualidades emocionales en diversos tipos de contenido en medios de comunicación. La primera parte de esta tesis tiene como objetivo la construcción de un marco teórico. Recientemente se han realizado estudios empíricos que sugieren que las emociones puede ser inconscientes. Si bien esto debe justificarse mejor, los científicos están motivados a reconsiderar las teorías actuales de la emoción para explicar este fenómeno. En vista de ello, integramos estos estudios sobre las emociones inconscientes en nuestra revisión de referencias bibliográficas incluyendo dominios de aplicación recientes, tales como la Computación Afectiva y el Diseño Emocional. Una dirección prometedora de investigación se basa en la aplicación de métodos del psicoanálisis para analizar contenidos multimedia como estímulos afectivos, y estos estímulos pueden ser evaluados mediante el uso de medidas cuantitativas para investigar la conexión entre el contenido y las emociones correspondientes. Este análisis se basa en la teoría de los arquetipos propuesto por el psicólogo Carl Jung. El autor sostiene que existe una patrón universal en los pensamientos inconscientes de los personas, que puede manifestarse como un símbolo contenido en las diversas formas de narrativas, como en los mitos y los cuentos de hadas. Hoy en día, estos arquetipos de contenido simbólico se puede ver frecuentemente en los contenidos multimedia modernos, sobre todo en las películas. Mediante la aplicación del enfoque de Jung, analizamos el significado simbólico en escenas de películas seleccionando las correspondientes a diversos arquetipos, que servirá como material experimental para exploraciones posteriores. En la segunda parte de esta tesis, se presentan tres estudios experimentales que apuntan a determinar si el contenido multimedia arquetípico puede diferenciarse en base a respuestas emocionales. Con el enfoque psicoanalítico descrito anteriormente para los arquetipos, también se incluye los estímulos afectivos de emociones explícitas son como puntos de referencia para la comparación, como la tristeza y la alegría. Se realizan auto-informes y se miden señales fisiológicas para la determinación de las respuestas emocionales en todos los experimentos realizados. Los resultados de estos estudios confirman que las emociones inducidas por arquetipos son diferentes de las emociones explícitas, y el análisis estadístico indica además que el modelo predictivo obtenido a partir de señales fisiológicas supera el modelo generado por los auto-informes durante la visualización de contenidos multimedia arquetípicos. Estos resultados, sin embargo, son opuestos a los resultados obtenidos a partir de los estímulos afectivos de emociones explícitas, llevándonos a la conclusión de que los contenidos de los medios arquetípicos podría inducir emociones inconscientes, y que las señales fisiológicas son más eficaces que los auto informes para el reconocimiento de las emociones inducidas por el contenido de medios arquetípico. En la tercera parte de esta tesis, exploramos cómo los contenidos arquetípicos podrían utilizarse para diseñar contenido multimedia mediante "mood boards". Se realizaron dos estudios con diseñadores para responder a la pregunta de investigación de si es posible generar contenido emocionalmente rico a través de la generación automática de contenido arquetípico por "mood boards" en comparación con el contenido multimedia no arquetípico

Movies and meaning: from low-level features to mind reading

When dealing with movies, closing the tremendous discontinuity between low-level features and the richness of semantics in the viewers' cognitive processes, requires a variety of approaches and different perspectives. For instance when attempting to relate movie content to users' affective responses, previous work suggests that a direct mapping of audio-visual properties into elicited emotions is difficult, due to the high variability of individual reactions. To reduce the gap between the objective level of features and the subjective sphere of emotions, we exploit the intermediate representation of the connotative properties of movies: the set of shooting and editing conventions that help in transmitting meaning to the audience. One of these stylistic feature, the shot scale, i.e. the distance of the camera from the subject, effectively regulates theory of mind, indicating that increasing spatial proximity to the character triggers higher occurrence of mental state references in viewers' story descriptions. Movies are also becoming an important stimuli employed in neural decoding, an ambitious line of research within contemporary neuroscience aiming at "mindreading". In this field we address the challenge of producing decoding models for the reconstruction of perceptual contents by combining fMRI data and deep features in a hybrid model able to predict specific video object classes

Recognizing Induced Emotions of Movie Audiences: Are Induced and Perceived Emotions the Same?

Predicting the emotional response of movie audi- ences to affective movie content is a challenging task in affective computing. Previous work has focused on using audiovisual movie content to predict movie induced emotions. However, the relationship between the audience’s perceptions of the affective movie content (perceived emotions) and the emotions evoked in the audience (induced emotions) remains unexplored. In this work, we address the relationship between perceived and in- duced emotions in movies, and identify features and modelling approaches effective for predicting movie induced emotions. First, we extend the LIRIS-ACCEDE database by annotating perceived emotions in a crowd-sourced manner, and find that perceived and induced emotions are not always consistent. Second, we show that dialogue events and aesthetic highlights are effective predictors of movie induced emotions. In addition to movie based features, we also study physiological and be- havioural measurements of audiences. Our experiments show that induced emotion recognition can benefit from including temporal context and from including multimodal information. Our study bridges the gap between affective content analysis and induced emotion prediction

Extracting Relevance and Affect Information from Physiological Text Annotation

We present physiological text annotation, which refers to the practice of associating physiological responses to text content in order to infer characteristics of the user information needs and affective responses. Text annotation is a laborious task, and implicit feedback has been studied as a way to collect annotations without requiring any explicit action from the user. Previous work has explored behavioral signals, such as clicks or dwell time to automatically infer annotations, and physiological signals have mostly been explored for image or video content. We report on two experiments in which physiological text annotation is studied first to 1) indicate perceived relevance and then to 2) indicate affective responses of the users. The first experiment tackles the user’s perception of relevance of an information item, which is fundamental towards revealing the user’s information needs. The second experiment is then aimed at revealing the user’s affective responses towards a -relevant- text document. Results show that physiological user signals are associated with relevance and affect. In particular, electrodermal activity (EDA) was found to be different when users read relevant content than when they read irrelevant content and was found to be lower when reading texts with negative emotional content than when reading texts with neutral content. Together, the experiments show that physiological text annotation can provide valuable implicit inputs for personalized systems. We discuss how our findings help design personalized systems that can annotate digital content using human physiology without the need for any explicit user interaction

Effects of mediated social touch on affective experiences and trust

This study investigated whether communication via mediated hand pressure during a remotely shared experience (watching an amusing video) can (1) enhance recovery from sadness, (2) enhance the affective quality of the experience, and (3) increase trust towards the communication partner. Thereto participants first watched a sad movie clip to elicit sadness, followed by a funny one to stimulate recovery from sadness. While watching the funny clip they signaled a hypothetical fellow participant every time they felt amused. In the experimental condition the participants responded by pressing a hand-held two-way mediated touch device (a Frebble), which also provided haptic feedback via simulated hand squeezes. In the control condition they responded by pressing a button and they received abstract visual feedback. Objective (heart rate, galvanic skin conductance, number and duration of joystick or Frebble presses) and subjective (questionnaires) data were collected to assess the emotional reactions of the participants. The subjective measurements confirmed that the sad movie successfully induced sadness while the funny movie indeed evoked more positive feelings. Although their ranking agreed with the subjective measurements, the physiological measurements confirmed this conclusion only for the funny movie. The results show that recovery from movie induced sadness, the affective experience of the amusing movie, and trust towards the communication partner did not differ between both experimental conditions. Hence, feedback via mediated hand touching did not enhance either of these factors compared to visual feedback. Further analysis of the data showed that participants scoring low on Extraversion (i.e., persons that are more introvert) or low on Touch Receptivity (i.e., persons who do not like to be touched by others) felt better understood by their communication partner when receiving mediated touch feedback instead of visual feedback, while the opposite was found for participants scoring high on these factors. The implications of these results for further research are discussed, and some suggestions for follow-up experiments are presented