Emotional responses to thermally augmented audiovisual stimuli

Physiological reactions to certain emotions make us feel warm or cold, thus there are strong bounds between emotions and temperature. However, within HCI research, using thermal information to evoke emotion related experiences is still rare. For the research presented in this paper a kidney belt with thermal actuators was developed in order to investigate the emotional responses to thermally augmented audiovisual stimuli (movie clips). Participants then continuously evaluated their emotional state via a tablet application on the dimensions “arousal” and “valence”. The results indicate that thermal stimulation has significant effects on the emotional experience of subjects. While emotions with negative valence are more prone to be affected on the arousal dimension, emotions with positive valence are significantly influenced on the valence dimension.