Emotion Science Video System: Clips With Categorical and Dimensional Ratings

The use of stimulus sets to study emotion has been a staple of emotion science research. Although many methods of emotion elicitation exist, the use of film (or video) clips has been a popular and effective choice. Even so, validated clips vary on many characteristics and quickly become outdated. Another drawback of current sets is rooted in the terms selected to rate the participants’ emotional responses. Due to varying theoretical viewpoints used to study emotion, stimulus sets are often only rated with categorical or dimensional emotion labels. As a result, the stimuli have limited versatility across research frameworks. To address some of these limitations, the current study recruited 401 undergraduates to complete an online video clip viewing study. Each participant viewed 10 clips (randomly selected from a 41-clip set) and rated them on both categorical and dimensional emotion items. Self-report ratings averaged across the emotion items indicate this stimulus set to be both effective in eliciting emotion, and versatile for both categorical and dimensional research paradigms. The present study produced the Emotion Science Video System, a robust, contemporary, and versatile set of video clips useful for research questions from varying theoretical viewpoints.