Glossary

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Affective Congruency

The degree to which a system's sensory outputs, interactions, and feedback align emotionally with the user's current affective state and the emotional meaning the user attaches to the experience. Distinct from perceptual congruency, affective congruency concerns whether the…

Affective Haptics(also: Emotional Haptics)

A subfield of haptic interaction design concerned with using tactile and kinaesthetic feedback — vibration, pressure, temperature, squeezing, stroking, heartbeat-like pulsation — to communicate, evoke, or regulate emotion. Affective haptics draws on research showing that touch…

Affective Touch(also: Social Touch, Emotional Touch)

The emotional and social dimension of touch, distinct from discriminative touch that identifies object properties. Affective touch is mediated primarily by C-tactile (CT) afferents in hairy skin and plays a fundamental role in social bonding, emotional communication, and…

Arousal(also: Emotional Arousal, Activation)

In affect and emotion research, arousal is the dimension of emotional experience that describes activation or energy level — how calm or excited a state feels — independent of whether the emotion is positive or negative (that second dimension is valence). In the widely used…

Autonomic Nervous System(also: ANS)

The division of the nervous system that regulates involuntary physiological processes including heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, digestion, and stress responses. The ANS has two main branches: the sympathetic nervous system (activating "fight or flight" responses) and…

Circumplex Model of Emotion(also: Russell Circumplex Model, Valence-Arousal Model, Circumplex Model of Affect)

A psychological model proposed by James Russell in 1980 that arranges emotional states in a two-dimensional plane defined by valence (pleasant vs unpleasant) and arousal (activated vs calm). The four quadrants correspond to high-arousal positive (e.g. excited, happy),…

Dominance (Emotion)(also: Emotional Dominance, Control Dimension)

In affective science, dominance is the third dimension sometimes added to the two-dimensional valence/arousal plane to form the Pleasure-Arousal-Dominance (PAD) model proposed by Mehrabian and Russell. Dominance describes the degree of control or power an emotion conveys — fear…

Dynamic Bayesian Network(also: DBN, Temporal Bayesian Network)

A probabilistic graphical model that represents sequences of variables over time, extending standard Bayesian networks to handle temporal relationships. In accessibility and affective computing contexts, Dynamic Bayesian Networks are used to model how facial expressions, head…

Ekman Basic Emotions(also: Basic Emotions, Ekman's Six Basic Emotions)

A taxonomy proposed by psychologist Paul Ekman that identifies six cross-culturally recognisable emotional expressions — happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and surprise — as the building blocks of facial affect. The model has been foundational for computer-vision…

EmojiGrid(also: Emoji Grid, EmojiGrid Scale)

A two-dimensional self-report tool, developed by Toet et al. (2018), in which participants rate the emotional content of a stimulus by clicking on a point in a grid whose axes are valence (horizontal) and arousal (vertical). Rows and columns of emoji faces are arranged around…

Emotional Mediation Hypothesis

A theoretical account, originating in work by Palmer and colleagues, that explains cross-modal associations between sensory attributes (such as colors and musical timbres) as being mediated by shared emotional meaning rather than by direct perceptual mapping. For example, people…

FaceReader(also: Noldus FaceReader)

A commercial facial-expression recognition software (developed by Noldus) that uses computer vision and deep learning to automatically classify faces into basic emotions (neutral, happy, sad, angry, surprised, scared, disgusted) and to estimate emotional valence and arousal in…

Facial Action Coding System(also: FACS)

A comprehensive, anatomically based system for describing all visually discernible facial movements, originally developed by Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen in 1977. FACS decomposes facial expressions into individual components called Action Units (AUs), each corresponding to the…

Facial Affect(also: Facial Expression of Emotion, Emotional Facial Expression)

The display of emotion through facial movements, including changes in the position of the eyebrows, eyes, mouth, and other facial features that communicate a person's emotional or mental state. Facial affect is a primary channel of nonverbal social communication and can convey…

Frisson(also: Aesthetic Chills, Musical Chills, Piloerection)

A psychophysiological response to music, art, or other aesthetic stimuli characterised by a pleasurable shiver or chills sensation accompanied by piloerection (goosebumps) and transient increases in heart rate and skin conductance. Frisson is associated with high emotional…

Heart Rate Variability(also: HRV)

The variation in time intervals between consecutive heartbeats, reflecting the balance between sympathetic (stress response) and parasympathetic (rest and recovery) branches of the autonomic nervous system. HRV is used as an objective measure of stress, emotional state, and…

Mediated Social Touch(also: Remote Touch, Tele-touch, Haptic Telepresence)

The use of haptic technology to simulate or communicate social touch gestures — such as stroking, squeezing, patting, or hugging — between people who are physically separated. Mediated social touch systems encode touch from one person and reproduce it on a remote partner's body…

Mood(also: Affect, Affective State)

In affective computing and music research, the emotional quality a stimulus evokes in a listener or viewer, commonly characterized along dimensions such as valence (pleasant–unpleasant) and arousal (calm–energetic). Mood is a core target for music information retrieval systems…

Musical Emotion(also: Music-Induced Emotion, Emotional Response to Music)

The emotional content perceived in, or felt in response to, a piece of music, typically analysed along dimensions such as valence and arousal or via categorical labels (cheerful, tense, calm, sad, energetic, love, dreamy). Musical emotion arises from low-level acoustic…

Photoplethysmography(also: PPG)

A non-invasive optical technique used to detect blood volume changes in peripheral circulation, commonly implemented in wearable devices like smartwatches and fitness trackers. PPG sensors use light (typically red and green LEDs) to measure how blood flow absorbs and reflects…

PrEmo(also: Product Emotion Measurement Instrument)

A non-verbal self-report tool for measuring emotional responses, developed by Pieter Desmet. PrEmo presents users with 14 cartoon-like icons representing seven positive emotions (joy, admiration, pride, hope, satisfaction, fascination, desire) and seven negative emotions…

Self-Assessment Manikin(also: SAM)

A nonverbal pictorial instrument developed by Bradley and Lang (1994) for measuring the affective dimensions of valence, arousal, and dominance. Respondents select from a row of stylised manikin figures whose expressions and body states vary along each dimension, typically on a…

Speech Emotion Recognition(also: SER, Vocal Emotion Recognition)

A class of machine-learning techniques that infers a speaker's emotional state from acoustic features of speech — pitch contour, intensity, rhythm, spectral properties, voice quality — usually producing a label (happy/sad/angry/calm) or continuous values on valence and arousal…

Stanford Emotional Narratives Dataset(also: SEND, SEND Dataset)

A publicly available dataset of short video clips of people telling emotionally significant personal stories, created by Ong et al. at Stanford (2019) to support multimodal emotion-recognition research. Each video is annotated continuously for valence, arousal, and…

Valence(also: Emotional Valence, Hedonic Tone)

In affective science, valence is the dimension of emotional experience that describes positivity versus negativity — whether a feeling is pleasant or unpleasant. Paired with arousal, valence forms the basis of the widely used two-dimensional circumplex model of emotion:…

Valence-Arousal Model(also: VA Model, Circumplex Model, Valence-Arousal Space)

A two-dimensional model of affect, introduced by Russell (1980), that represents emotional states along two orthogonal axes: valence (pleasant versus unpleasant) and arousal (activated versus deactivated). Emotions such as cheerful, tense, calm, and sad map to the four quadrants…

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