Lists of Emotional Stimuli

Abstract The development of lists of emotional stimuli has fostered our understanding about emotional processes by facilitating the selection of appropriate stimuli for experimental settings and comparison across experimental settings. To assist in the decision-making process of experimental work, we propose the emotion matrix as a simplified way of comparing different types of stimuli on their ecological validity, temporal resolution, controllability, complexity, and emotional intensity. Based on these five characteristics in the emotion matrix, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using words, images, faces, or film clips in emotion research. By doing so, we present some of the major available lists of words, images, faces, and film clips and we describe major characteristics of these sets.