A Survey on Usage of Multimedia Databases for Emotion Elicitation: A Quantitative Report on How Content Diversity Can Improve Performance

Affective picture databases provide a standardized set of images to elicit controlled and consistent emotional responses in research participants. They are a valuable tool for studying various emotion-related phenomena across several research domains. These domains include emotion perception, emotion regulation, and the neural basis of emotion. However, affective picture databases have diverse schemas, structures, and content, making them difficult to use. Searching and retrieving optimal pictures relevant to affective stimulation may be challenging and time-consuming. In this context, we surveyed domain experts about their practices and experiences working with affective multimedia databases such as IAPS, NAPS, OASIS, GAPED, and others. The survey identified a need for novel data observatory software. This finding motivates the authors' intention to develop and validate such software platform that relies on AI. Such a platform would describe better, retrieve, and integrate various semi-structured affective multimedia datasets. The results prominently indicate the overwhelming dissatisfaction regarding stimuli content diversity and cultural bias, specifically regarding emotional and semantic context. The main driver of satisfaction from users of existing automated retrieval software is the quality of semantic descriptors available. This points to the direction AI should take in novel data observatory software. This survey follows up on a similar survey conducted ten years ago and explores the differences in researchers' opinions and experiences during that time. The complete aggregated results are publicly available at https://github.com/mhorvat/stimdbsurvey.