Emotionally evocative videos (movies) intended to elicit natural facial expressions were collected from publicly accessible sources and trimmed into 3–5 s clips. All video stimuli were tested and rated for emotive properties by laboratory members. The clips contained no political, violent or frightening content, and participants were given general examples of what they might see prior to the start of the experiment. The three categories of videos included: ‘neutrals’, featuring landscapes; ‘adorables’, featuring cute animal antics; and ‘creepies’, featuring spiders, worms and states of decay. Videos were rated prior to use in the experiment according to the intensity of emotions experienced (from 0 to 100 on a continuous-measure Likert-type scale; 0: the specific emotion was not experienced, and 100: emotion was present and highly intense) according to basic emotion types (joy, sadness, anger, disgust, surprise and fear). For example, a video clip of pandas rolling down a hill (from the 'adorables' category) might be rated an 80 for joy, 40 for surprise and 0 for sadness, fear, anger and disgust. Responses were collected and averaged for each video. The final calibrated set used in the experiment consisted of clips that best evoked intense affective reactions (except for the ‘neutrals’ category, from which the lowest-rated videos were chosen).
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