University of Geneva

Beyond Self-Reports: Predicting Electrodermal Arousal from Gameplay and Physiological Features

Electrodermal activity serves as a superior, objective metric for measuring player arousal compared to traditional subjective self-assessments.

• Tonic electrodermal activity is a more reliable and objective metric for measuring player arousal than subjective self-assessments, which are prone to individual bias.
• XGBoost predictive modeling achieves high accuracy for tonic activity, reaching median concordance correlation coefficients of approximately 0.9.
• Machine learning models are currently better at capturing long-term session trends via tonic activity than they are at predicting rapid, stimulus-driven phasic physiological spikes.