Emotion Elicitation and Capture among Real Couples in the Lab

Couples’ relationships affect partners’ mental and physical well-being. Automatic recognition of couples’ emotions will not only help to better understand the interplay of emotions, intimate relationships, and health and well-being, but also provide crucial clinical insights into protective and risk factors of relationships, and can ultimately guide interventions. However, several works developing emotion recognition algorithms use data from actors in artificial dyadic interactions and the algorithms are likely not to perform well on real couples. We are developing emotion recognition methods using data from real couples and, in this paper, we describe two studies we ran in which we collected emotion data from real couples — Dutch-speaking couples in Belgium and German-speaking couples in Switzerland. We discuss our approach to eliciting and capturing emotions and make five recommendations based on their relevance for developing well-performing emotion recognition systems for couples.