Eye gaze patterns in emotional pictures

This paper reports on a preliminary study aiming at investigating the eye gaze pattern and pupil size variation to discriminate emotional states induced by looking at pictures having different arousal content. A wearable and wireless eye gaze tracking system, hereinafter called HATCAM, which was able to robustly detect eye tracking and pupil area was used. A group of ten volunteers was presented with a set of neutral and arousal pictures extracted from the International Affective Picture System according to an ad-hoc experimental protocol. A set of features was extracted from eye gaze patterns and pupil size variations and used to classify the two classes of pictures. Although preliminary, results are very promising for affective computing applications.