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.