The creation of the micro world scenarios is based on theoretical predictions concerning emotion antecedent appraisal and emotion specific action tendencies as postulated by different cognitive emotion theorists, and on prototypical emotion antecedent events, as postulated by discrete emotion theorists. Data on game events and their context as well as the players' interventions are recorded continuously. Verbal reports are gathered in two ways. Firstly, we use automatic questionnaires that appear on the screen during the game in predefined situations. We conducted a series of experiments to test and validate the theoretically based scenarios.
First analyses reveal a large inter-individual variance and a variety of facial expressions.
Further analyses show that facial expressions can occur very rapidly as a reaction to a given event. In addition we notice changes in facial activity while subjects anticipate events. Besides these event-related facial changes, there are facial expressions which remain on the players face for a relatively long period. Our data shows that the players' faces are only rarely neutral. The first part of the presentation will concentrate on methodological problems related to the definition and analysis of emotional episodes.