Brief Report

Abstract In the past decade several film sets for the induction of emotions have been developed. These film sets mainly consist of emotional clips from feature films. Since the neutral stimuli in these sets were abstract scenes, documentary or television excerpts, the aim of the present study was to develop a set that includes comparable neutral stimuli from commercially available feature films that match the emotional ones in their content. Furthermore, the capacity of the emotional film clips to elicit a specific target emotion was evaluated. Four neutral clips were selected and shown to 38 subjects, together with 16 emotional clips from earlier studies on emotion induction. Four clips were selected to elicit anger, and three clips to elicit each of the target emotions disgust, fear, sadness, and amusement. The participants rated their feelings on 21 emotion scales. Cluster analysis confirmed the six a priori groups of films. ANOVA further revealed that the four neutral clips, were rated neutral on the valence and low on the intensity dimension. Most of the emotional film clips primarily elicited their respective target emotion. In summary, at least two clips for each target emotion were able to elicit that emotion selectively.