Identifying Psychophysiological Correlates of Boredom and Negative Mood Induced During HCI

This paper presents work conducted towards the automatic recognition of negative emotions like boredom and frustration, induced due to the subject’s loss of interest during HCI. Focus was on the basic pre-requisite for the future development of systems utilizing an “affective loop”, namely effective recognition of the human affective state. Based on the concept of “repetition that causes loss of interest”, an experiment for the monitoring and analysis of biosignals during repetitive HCI tasks was deployed. During this experiment, subjects were asked to play a simple labyrinth-based 3D video game repeatedly, while biosignals from different modalities were monitored. Twenty one different subjects participated in the experiment, allowing for a rich biosignals database to be populated. Statistically significant correlations were identified between features extracted from two of the modalities used in the experiment (ECG and GSR) and the actual affective state of the subjects.