Respiration Patterns as Somatic Prints of Emotions: An Alternative Assessment for HCI Scenarios?

Abstract

This study investigates the intricate dynamics of emotional and physiological responses triggered during various web-based tasks. 18 participants interacted with a controlled online store environment and completed tasks designed to evoke different levels of emotions. Throughout these tasks, breathing patterns were measured using a respiration belt, along with participants' self-reports of their emotional states. Breathing patterns varied between tasks and were correlated with self-assessed emotions, suggesting a link between the two. Our research contributes to the assessment of physiological prints of emotions in the HCI literature in two crucial ways: by providing an experimental setup that triggers only light emotions, reflecting everyday HCI scenarios, and introducing a set of respiration metrics to enhance the understanding of breathing patterns during HCI tasks. As such, our paper extends previous work by explicitly examining breathing patterns as standalone somatic markers and examines the strengths and shortcomings of these within HCI research.