  Multimedia documents such as text, images, sounds or videos elicit emotional
responses of different polarity and intensity in exposed human subjects. These
stimuli are stored in affective multimedia databases. The problem of emotion
processing is an important issue in Human-Computer Interaction and different
interdisciplinary studies particularly those related to psychology and
neuroscience. Accurate prediction of users' attention and emotion has many
practical applications such as the development of affective computer
interfaces, multifaceted search engines, video-on-demand, Internet
communication and video games. To this regard we present results of a study
with N=10 participants to investigate the capability of standardized affective
multimedia databases in stimulation of emotion. Each participant was exposed to
picture and video stimuli with previously determined semantics and emotion.
During exposure participants' physiological signals were recorded and estimated
for emotion in an off-line analysis. Participants reported their emotion states
after each exposure session. The a posteriori and a priori emotion values were
compared. The experiment showed, among other reported results, that carefully
designed video sequences induce a stronger and more accurate emotional reaction
than pictures. Individual participants' differences greatly influence the
intensity and polarity of experienced emotion.
