Title: Impact of affective picture and music stimuli on autonomic responses: characterisation of pauses between emotion blocks

Authors: Atefeh Goshvarpour; Ataollah Abbasi; Ateke Goshvarpour

Addresses: Department of Biomedical Engineering, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Sahand University of Technology, P.O. Box 51335/1996, New Sahand Town, Tabriz, Iran ' Department of Biomedical Engineering, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Sahand University of Technology, P.O. Box 51335/1996, New Sahand Town, Tabriz, Iran ' Department of Biomedical Engineering, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Sahand University of Technology, P.O. Box 51335/1996, New Sahand Town, Tabriz, Iran

Abstract: The main goal of this study was to investigate the role of stimulus contents on physiological responses. Usually some pauses between the incentives are considered in an experiment to bring the physiological signals to the base. However, the role of these halts on emotional responses has not been carefully evaluated so far. Therefore, in the current study the effect of pauses between emotional blocks of an inducement was inspected. To this effect, autonomic signals were recorded using two emotion elicitation paradigms: image induction and music excerpts. Several standard and nonlinear features were extracted. The Mann-Whitney U-test was employed to determine the significant differences between the pause segments and rest condition. The results of this study indicated that pause duration between affective blocks of stimuli has a great impact on the emotional autonomic responses. The importance of specialised protocol designing for a specific biomedical signal is concluded from the findings.

Keywords: signal; emotion; image; music; pause intervals.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMEI.2018.091210

International Journal of Medical Engineering and Informatics, 2018 Vol.10 No.2, pp.188 - 198

Received: 16 May 2016
Accepted: 07 Mar 2017

Published online: 16 Apr 2018 *

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