What do we feel about archetypes: self-reports and physiological signals

Abstract

In research on emotion, presenting affective stimuli has been believed to be an effective and reliable technique for emotion elicitation. Instead of collecting stimuli for predefined emotions, we propose to develop stimuli based on their symbolic meanings. We adopted archetypal symbolism as a standard to edit eight movie clips of archetypes as a new set of affective stimuli. These stimuli were used in an experiment for emotion elicitation. Participants’ emotional responses toward these stimuli of archetypes were measured by the self-report technique and the physiological measurement. The results of linear discriminant analysis show that physiological measurement is more robust than the self-report techniques in recognizing emotions toward stimuli of archetypes. However, it is still unclear which technique reflects the ground truth of human emotion. We discuss alternative implications of these results, and provide more research questions for future studies on emotion recognition and model development.