  Multimedia documents such as images, sounds or videos can be used to elicit
emotional responses in exposed human subjects. These stimuli are stored in
affective multimedia databases and successfully used for a wide variety of
research in affective computing, human-computer interaction and cognitive
sciences. Affective multimedia databases are simple repositories of multimedia
documents with annotated high-level semantics and affective content. Although
important all affective multimedia databases have numerous deficiencies which
impair their applicability. To establish a better understanding of how experts
use affective multimedia databases an online survey was conducted into the
subject. The survey results are statistically significant and indicate that
contemporary databases lack stimuli with rich semantic and emotional content.
73.33% of survey participants find the databases lacking at least some
important semantic or emotion content. Most of the participants consider
stimuli descriptions to be inadequate. Overall, 1-2h or more than 24h are
generally needed to construct a single stimulation sequence. Almost 84% of the
survey participants would like to use real-life videos in their research.
Experts unequivocally recognize the need for an intelligent stimuli retrieval
application that would assist them in experimentation. Almost all experts agree
such applications could be useful in their work.
