A machine learning approach to predict emotional arousal and valence from gaze extracted features

In the last years, many studies have been investigating emotional arousal and valence. Most of them have focused on the use of physiological signals such as EEG or EMG, cardiovascular measures or skin conductance. However, eye related features have proven to be very helpful and easy to use metrics, especially pupil size and blink activity. The aim of this study is to predict emotional arousal and valence levels which are induced during emotionally charged situations from eye related features. For this reason, we performed an experimental study where the participants watched emotion-eliciting videos and self-assessed their emotions, while their eye movements were being recorded. In this work, several classifiers such as KNN, SVM, Naive Bayes, Trees and Ensemble methods were trained and tested. Finally, emotional arousal and valence levels were predicted with 85 and 91% efficiency, respectively.