Physiological Measurement: Skin Conductance

Electrodermal activity (EDA) is a valid and reliable psychophysiological measure of audience arousal. In particular, it is useful to indicate emotional processing of media content during media exposure.

Emotional processes are essential to how the brain processes information and adapts to the social world. The experience of consuming media content is fundamentally an emotional one and is therefore of huge interest for communication research.[Page 1251] While most meaningful experiences are accompanied by intense emotions, they are often fleeting, unconscious, difficult to describe, hard to remember, and in the case of negative experiences, such as hate or embarrassment, susceptible to social desirability when trying to measure these experiences. In empirical research, this often leads to distorted or even invalid self-reports, calling for measures of ...