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Skin conductance is a commonly used physiological measure during psychology experiments, such as during fear conditioning. Methods for scoring skin conductance responses are highly heterogeneous, though most researchers agree that manually inspected scores provide the highest quality data when compared to most available fully automated scoring methods. However, manual scoring is extremely time-consuming. We developed a semi-automated scoring program that significantly reduces the time required to process skin conductance response data at a level of quality akin to manual scoring. In contrast to all previous scoring programs, our program enables scoring of first, second, and third interval skin conductance responses. Using interclass correlation coefficients, Bland-Altman plots and Pareto analysis, we show here that our method is highly reliable and produces data that are almost identical to data that are manually scored. This software is very easy to use and is freely available to download and modify. We expect that this software will be helpful in reducing the time required to produce high quality first, second, and third interval skin conductance data for psychology researchers around the world.
Ney et al. (Mon,) studied this question.