Emotional pictures are commonly used as visual stimuli in a number of research fields. Choosing relevant visual stimuli to induce emotion is fundamental in attachment and affective research. Attachment theory provides a theoretical basis for the understanding of emotional and relational problems, and is especially related to two specific emotions: distress and comfort. The lack of normalized visual stimuli soliciting these attachment-related emotions has led us to create and validate a new photographic database: the Besançon Affective Picture Set-Adolescents. This novel stimulus set is composed of 93 photographs, divided into four categories: distress, comfort, joy-complicity and neutral. A group of 140 adolescents rated the pictures with the Self-Assessment Manikin system, yielding three dimensions: valence, emotional arousal, and dominance. The pictures were also assessed, using a continuous scale, for different emotions (distress, hate, horror, comfort, complicity and joy). The ANOVAs for arousal and the Kruskal-Wallis tests for valence and dominance showed strong effects for category. However, for comfort and complicity, the dimensions of valence and dominance were not significantly different, while results for arousal showed no significant difference between complicity and distress. Our study provides a tool that allows researchers to select visual stimuli to investigate attachment-related emotion processing in adolescence.
Keywords: Affective visual stimuli; Attachment; Comfort; Distress; Emotions.
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