Recognizing Emotions in Human Computer Interaction: Studying Stress Using Skin Conductance

This paper reports an experiment for stress recognition in human-computer interaction. Thirty-one healthy participants performed five stressful HCI tasks and their skin conductance signals were monitored. The selected tasks were most frequently listed as stressful by 15 typical computer users who were involved in pre-experiment interviews asking them to identify stressful cases of computer interaction. The collected skin conductance signals were analyzed using seven popular machine learning classifiers. The best stress recognition accuracy was achieved by the cubic support vector machine classifier both per task (on average 90.8 %) and for all tasks (Mean = 98.8 %, SD = 0.6 %). This very high accuracy demonstrates the potentials of using physiological signals for stress recognition in the context of typical HCI tasks. In addition, the results allow us to move on a first integration of the specific stress recognition mechanism in PhysiOBS, a previously-proposed software tool that supports researchers and practitioners in user emotional experience evaluation.