Tokyo Metropolitan University researchers employed long-term skin conductance measurements to distinguish between emotions. Volunteers were given videos representing frightening scenarios, family bonding, and humor, while their skin conductance was measured.
The team’s investigation revealed that traces might be used to create accurate estimations about which emotions were being experienced. Advances like this assist in reducing an overreliance on facial data, bringing emotionally sensitive technologies closer to home.
A new frontier is being pioneered in consumer electronics: one day, digital devices might be able to offer services depending on your emotional state. While this sounds amazing, this depends on whether devices can correctly tell what people are feeling. The most common methods depend on facial expressions: while these have had some success, such data may not always be available. This has led to researchers looking for different biological signals which could be interpreted to access emotional states, like brain wave measurements or cardiograms.
A team of scientists led by Professor Shogo Okamoto from Tokyo Metropolitan University have been using skin conductance as a doorway to human emotions. When people feel different things, the electrical properties of their skin change drastically due to perspiration, with signals showing up within one to three seconds of the original stimulus. Previous research has already shown that measurements of peak conductance, for example, can be correlated with certain emotions. In their most recent work, the team focused on the dynamics of the response i.e. how quickly the conductance trace following some stimulus reaches a peak, and how it decays back to normal.