Users' Response to Affective Film Content: a Narrative Perspective

In this paper, we take a human-centred view to the definition of the affective content of films. We investigate the relationship between users physiological response and multimedia features extracted from the movies, from the perspective of narrative evolution rather than by measuring average values. We found a certain dynamic correlation between arousal, derived from measures of Galvanic Skin Resistance during film viewing, and specific multimedia features in both sound and video domains. Dynamic physiological measurements were also consistent with post-experiment self-assessment by the subjects. These findings suggest that narrative aspects (including staging) are central to the understanding of video affective content, and that direct mapping of video features to emotional models taken from psychology may not capture these phenomena in a straightforward manner.