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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Psychol.
Sec. Emotion Science
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1440425
This article is part of the Research Topic Exploring the Emotional Landscape: Cutting-Edge Technologies for Emotion Assessment and Elicitation View all 10 articles

Explicit Metrics for Implicit Emotions: Investigating Physiological and Gaze Indices of Learner Emotions

Provisionally accepted

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Learning experiences are intertwined with emotions, which in turn have a significant effect on learning outcomes. Therefore, digital learning environments can benefit from taking the emotional state of the learner into account. To do so, the first step is real-time emotion detection which is made possible by sensors that can continuously collect physiological and eye-tracking data. In this paper, we aimed to find features derived from skin conductance, skin temperature, and eye movements that could be used as indicators of learner emotions.Forty-four university students completed different math related tasks during which sensor data and self-reported data on the learner's emotional state were collected. Results indicate that skin conductance response peak count, tonic skin conductance, fixation count, duration and dispersion, saccade count, duration and amplitude, and blink count and duration may be used to distinguish between different emotions. These features may be used to make learning environments more emotionally aware.

    Keywords: emotion recognition, Learner emotions, physiological signals, Eye-tracking, Sensors, wearables

    Received: 29 May 2024; Accepted: 08 Nov 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Lal, Eysink, Gijlers, Veldkamp, Steinrücke and Verwey. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Sharanya Lal, University of Twente, Enschede, Netherlands

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.