Electrodermal response propagation time as a potential psychophysiological marker

Electrodermal activity is amongst the main psychophysiological arousal indicators used in clinical and affective computing application scenarios. This is mostly due to the relation between the skin conductance responses and the autonomic nervous system activity, in particular, the sympathetic subsystem operation. Although thermal regulation is also controlled by these components of the nervous system, which is expressed as a tonic variation in the electrodermal activity signals, reactions to psychological stimuli can also be detected, in this case, expressed as phasic variations. So far, there is still no clear consensus regarding the relation between the specific responses of the autonomic nervous system activity, and the features typically extracted from the electrodermal activity signals. Therefore, signal processing and feature extraction have been active research topics in the field. In this paper we present an experimental setup and corresponding data analysis for electrodermal response propagation time measurement. Experimental results have revealed interesting properties in this signal, enhancing its potential as a psychophysiological marker, and thus further expanding the toolbox for researchers in the field.