Emotion elicitation using films

Abstract

Researchers interested in emotion have long struggled with the problem of how to elicit emotional responses in the laboratory. In this article, we summarise five years of work to develop a set of films that reliably elicit each of eight emotional states (amusement, anger, contentment, disgust, fear, neutral, sadness, and surprise). After evaluating over 250 films, we showed selected film clips to an ethnically diverse sample of 494 English-speaking subjects. We then chose the two best films for each of the eight target emotions based on the intensity and discreteness of subjects' responses to each film. We found that our set of 16 films successfully elicited amusement, anger, contentment. disgust, sadness, surprise, a relatively neutral state, and, to a lesser extent, fear. We compare this set of films with another set recently described by Philippot (1993), and indicate that detailed instructions for creating our set of film stimuli will be provided on request.