Assessing the effectiveness of a large database of emotion-eliciting films: A new tool for emotion researchers

Abstract

Using emotional film clips is one of the most popular and effective methods of emotion elicitation. The main goal of the present study was to develop and test the effectiveness of a new and comprehensive set of emotional film excerpts. Fifty film experts were asked to remember specific film scenes that elicited fear, anger, sadness, disgust, amusement, tenderness, as well as emotionally neutral scenes. For each emotion, the 10 most frequently mentioned scenes were selected and cut into film clips. Next, 364 participants viewed the film clips in individual laboratory sessions and rated each film on multiple dimensions. Results showed that the film clips were effective with regard to several criteria such as emotional discreteness, arousal, positive and negative affect. Finally, ranking scores were computed for 24 classification criteria: Subjective arousal, positive and negative affect (derived from the PANAS; Watson & Tellegen, 1988), a positive and a negative affect scores derived from the Differential Emotions Scale (DES; Izard et al., 1974), six emotional discreteness scores (for anger, disgust, sadness, fear, amusement and tenderness), and 15 “mixed feelings” scores assessing the effectiveness of each film excerpt to produce blends of specific emotions. In addition, a number of emotionally neutral film clips were also validated. The database and editing instructions to construct the film clips have been made freely available in a website.

Keywords:

• Emotion
• Films
• Arousal
• Valence
• Validation

Acknowledgements

The writing of this article has been facilitated by grants from the “Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique” (FNRS) 8.4510.99 and 8.4510.00.

The authors thank Deanna Barch, Todd Braver and Jeremy Gray for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript. The authors also wish to thank Sylvie De Coninck, Cécile Misonne and Olivier Beauclercq for their contribution to the data collection, Pierre Mahau and Richard Robert for their help in recording and editing the film excerpts, and Adam Rickart for helping with the data analysis.

The database of stimuli can be found at this URL: http://nemo.psp.ucl.ac.be/FilmStim/.

Notes

¹We used the criterion proposed by Schmitt (1996), according to which α=.50 is satisfactory if the composite measure has a meaningful content coverage of some domain and reasonable unidimensionality.

²We thank Scott Hemenover for this suggestion.

³Detailed information about the film excerpts used in this study is available at the following URL: http://nemo.psp.ucl.ac.be/FilmStim/. This website contains the database used for this study, free of charge.