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Emotion Recognition Assessment in Multiple modalities (ERAM)

Goal and features of the ERAM

The Emotion Recognition Assessment in Multiple Modalities test (Laukka et al., 2021) aims at measuring people’s ability to recognize emotional communication in the face and the voice of persons. It provides an overall measure of recognition accuracy, as well as separate assessments of facial, vocal, and multimodal recognition accuracy. The instrument, which serves as a short version of the MERT (Bänziger et al., 2009), consists of a series of 72 brief audio-video recordings of persons who show different emotions, taken from the GEMEP corpus (Bänziger et al., 2012). After each stimulus, participants are asked to select one emotion label from a list of 12 emotions (Fig. 1). There are three blocks in total: 24 clips without sound, 24 sounds without picture, and 24 clips with sound and picture. The total duration of the test is 20 minutes.

Obtaining the ERAM for research purposes

The ERAM is available for academic research purposes free of charge. Researchers who would like to use the test are requested to read the Manual and complete the user agreement that can be both downloaded here: Manual ERAM manual 2021.pdf, User Agreement  ERAM User Agreement 2021.pdf

The distribution of the tests is currently handled by the European Consortium for Research on Emotional Competence Assessment (EURECA) based at Ghent University in Belgium. The completed user agreement (signed and scanned) and a 1/2 page project description need to be sent to eureca(at)ugent.be . If all conditions specified in the user agreement are met, EURECA will share the requested test either via Qualtrics (Qualtrics is a registered trademark of Qualtrics, Provo, UT) or LimeSurvey (LimeSurvey Project Team/ Carsten Schmitz, 2012). If you do not have any experience with any of the two survey tools, we recommend using Qualtrics.

Publications

  • Bänziger, T., Mortillaro, M., & Scherer, K. R. (2012). Introducing the Geneva Multimodal Expression Corpus for Experimental Research on Emotion Perception. Emotion, 12(5), 1161-1179.
  • Bänziger, T., Grandjean, D., & Scherer, K. R. (2009). Emotion recognition from expressions in face, voice, and body: The multimodal emotion recognition test (MERT). Emotion, 9(5), 691–704.
  • Laukka, P., Bänziger, T., Israelsson, A., Cortes, D. S., Tornberg, C., Scherer, K. R., & Fischer, H. (2021). Investigating individual differences in emotion recognition ability using the ERAM test. Acta Psychologica, 220, Article 103422. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2021.103422