Task-based mood induction procedures for the elicitation of natural emotional responses

This paper details experimental procedures designed to elicit natural emotional responses from participants within a controlled acoustic environment. The experiments use Mood Induction Procedures (MIP's), specifically the Success/Failure M1P, to implement a co-operative task using two participants. The cooperative tasks are designed to engender emotional responses of activation and evaluation from the participants who are situated in separate isolation booths. The use of MIP's ensures that the emotional content of assets is as authentic as possible; the authenticity of simulated assets and broadcast assets is debatable. The use of isolation booths reduces unwanted noise in the signal, prevents the participants from being distracted and ensures a cleanly recorded audio signal. The audio is recorded at a professional level of quality (24 bit/192Khz). The emotional dimensions of each audio recording will be evaluated using listening tests in conjunction with the Feel Tracc tool, providing a statistical evaluation of these recordings that will be used to compile an emotional speech corpus. This corpus can then be analysed to define a set of rules for the detection of emotional dimensions in speech.