Portrayed emotions in the movie "Forrest Gump"

Abstract

Here we present a dataset with a description of portrayed emotions in the movie "Forrest Gump". A total of 12 observers independently annotated emotional episodes regarding their temporal location and duration. The nature of an emotion was characterized with basic attributes, such as arousal and valence, as well as explicit emotion category labels. In addition, annotations include a record of the perceptual evidence for the presence of an emotion. Two variants of the movie were annotated separately: 1) an audio-movie version of Forrest Gump that has been used as a stimulus for the acquisition of a large public functional brain imaging dataset, and 2) the original audio-visual movie. We present reliability and consistency estimates that suggest that both stimuli can be used to study visual and auditory emotion cue processing in real-life like situations. Raw annotations from all observers are publicly released in full in order to maximize their utility for a wide range of applications and possible future extensions. In addition, aggregate time series of inter-observer agreement with respect to particular attributes of portrayed emotions are provided to facilitate adoption of these data.

Keywords: Audio-visual stimulus; Emotional episodes; Emotional processing cues; Forrest Gump; fMRI.

Figure 1.. Annotation frequencies by character and emotion.

The minimum criterion for counting emotion episodes is a 50% inter-observer agreement. Only categories/characters with a minimum of five such episodes are shown. The left panels show the number of episodes for both movie variants; the right panels show the cumulative duration of emotion display across all considered episodes. The top panels show the annotation frequency by movie character; the bottom panels show the corresponding frequencies for emotion categories.

Figure 2.. Number of emotion episodes for all distinguished onset cue categories (minimum 50% inter-rater agreement) for both stimulus types.

Figure 3.. Inter-observer agreement (IOA) time courses for selected emotion attributes across the full duration of the movie.

Extreme values indicate perfect agreement with respect to presence or absence of a particular emotion attribute at a given time. IOA time series for the two movie types are overlaid on top of each other. For the purpose of visualization, the depicted time series reflects IOA computed using a 10 s segment size — in contrast to 1 s used for all other statistics presented in this paper.

Figure 4.. Intra-stimulus indicator correlation.

The lower triangular matrix depicts the correlations between the IOA time courses for the three primary bipolar emotion attributes (arousal [high/low], valence [pos/neg], and direction [self/other]), the 22 emotion categories, and the six emotion onset indicators for the audio-visual movie. The upper triangular matrix shows the corresponding correlations for the audio-only movie. There were no observations for the emotion “fears confirmed”, or the facial expression onset cue in the audio-only movie. Likewise, there were no observations for the “narrator” onset cue in the audio-visual movie. The corresponding undefined correlations are depicted as zeros.