Emotion Elicitation in a Computerized Gambling Game

We designed a novel computer controlled environment that could elicit emotions in subjects while they were uttering short identical phrases. The paradigm was based on Damasio´s experiment for eliciting apprehension and was implemented by a voice activated computer game. Recordings of dozens of identical sentences were collected per subject, which were coupled to events in the game - gain or loss of points. Prosodic features of the recorded utterances were extracted , and classified. The resultant classifier achieved 78-85% recognition of presence/absence of apprehension.