What is GSR (galvanic skin response)

and how does it work?

May 12th, 2015

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You’re crawling along the ridge, 6000 feet above the ground. Below, dark abyss. Your hands
begin to sti漀椀en into useless claws, cold air is burning in your lungs. “Careful now, watch out” –
it’s just a few more pulls until you reach the top. While you force your way up, taking one nub
of rock at a time, you can hardly breathe as sweat pearls are running down your face. The
harrowing fear of losing grip is making your mind spin…
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As you switch o漀椀 the TV in the comfy, sheltered atmosphere of your living room, you still feel
the rage of your heartbeat, the dryness of your mouth and eyes. With sweaty hands, you
reach for a glass of water and can’t help but chuckle to yourself, ba爀漀ed by the plain fact that
time and again it seems to take as little as some gripping pictures to give you the creeps, send
chills down your spine and do some more things to your body that are obviously beyond your
conscious control…
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One of the most sensitive markers for emotional arousal is galvanic skin response (GSR),
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also referred to as skin conductance (SC) or electro-dermal activity (EDA). EDA modulates
the amount of sweat secretion from sweat glands. The amount of sweat glands varies across
the human body, being highest in hand and foot regions (200–600 sweat glands per cm2).
While sweat secretion plays a major role for thermoregulation and sensory discrimination,
changes in skin conductance in hand and foot regions are also triggered quite impressively by
emotional stimulation (Boucsein, 2012): the higher the arousal, the higher the skin
conductance. It is noteworthy to mention that both positive (“happy” or “joyful”) and negative
(“threatening” or “saddening”) stimuli can result in an increase in arousal – and in an increase
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in skin conductance.
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Skin conductance is not under conscious control. Instead, it is modulated autonomously by

sympathetic activity which drives human behavior, cognitive and emotional states on a
subconscious level. Skin conductance therefore o漀椀ers direct insights into autonomous
emotional regulation. It can be used as alternative to self-re㘀㄀ective test procedures, or – even
better – as additional source of insight to validate verbal self-reports or interviews of a
respondent.
Exemplary GSR time course during an episode of “Breaking Bad” as visualized in iMotions
Biometric Research Platform. Synchronized screen capture and facial video streams
provide additional information on emotional states of the respondent.

Skin conductance is captured using skin

electrodes which are easy to apply (such as the
Shimmer GSR+ module). Data is acquired with
sampling rates between 1 – 10 Hz and is
measured in units of micro-Siemens (μS). The
time course of the signal is considered to be the
result of two additive processes: a tonic base
level driver, which 㘀㄀uctuates very slowly
(seconds to minutes), and a faster-varying phasic component (㘀㄀uctuating within seconds).
Changes in phasic activity can be identi　㈀ed in the continuous data stream with bare eyes as
these bursts have a steep incline to a distinctive peak and a slow decline to baseline level.
Whenever investigating GSR signal changes in response to sensory stimuli (images, videos,
sounds), researchers focus on the latency and amplitudes of the phasic bursts with respect to
stimulus onset. This is also referred to as Event-Related Skin Conductance Response (ER-
SCR). Interestingly, changes in GSR can also be described within a longer time interval, e.g.,
while watching a video or movie. In that case, Non-Stimulus-locked Skin Conductance
Responses (NS-SCR) characteristics are analyzed such as number of peaks and inter-peak
latencies within a longer time window in order to characterize a respondent’s emotional
arousal.

Tyler et al. (2015) recently published results describing a signi　㈀cant reduction in arousal (as
re㘀㄀ected by reduced modulations in skin conductance) by transdermal electrical
neurosignaling. In their study, Tyler and team used iMotions Biometric Research Platform to
monitor the changes in skin conductance. The synchronized acquisition of GSR with other
sensors (such as optical heart rate, EEG or facial EMG) as well as video-based facial expression
analysis opens completely new horizons towards multimodal experimental setups and cross-
sensor analysis strategies which provide
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processes and higher cognitive-behavioral systems.

A screenshot from Ledalab (a freely available

MATLAB toolbox for the analysis of GSR data). The
toolbox decomposes the continuous data into a
tonic base component (brown) and a phasic
component (blue), which is sensitive to emotional
stimuli (red vertical lines).

Please contact the team at iMotions if you have any questions regarding GSR or
biometric research.

If you would like to read more about the theory behind skin conductance, its
applications and analysis, we recommend the following resources:

Boucsein, W. (2012). Electrodermal Activity. New York, Berlin: Springer, 2nd edition. (link)
 Benedek, M., & Kaernbach, C. (2010). Decomposition of skin conductance data by means
of nonnegative deconvolution. Psychophysiology, 47, 647–658. doi:10.1111/j.1469-
8986.2009.00972.x (link)
Benedek, M., & Kaernbach, C. (2010). A continuous measure of phasic electrodermal
activity. Journal of Neuroscience Methods, 190, 80–91.
doi:10.1016/j.jneumeth.2010.04.028 (link)
LEDALAB. A MATLAB toolbox for GSR analysis. (link)

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Related posts:

Galvanic Skin Response, Trends and Applications

Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) – The Pocket Guide
Why you should combine EEG with other biometric sensors
 3 striking reasons why you should use GSR to push your insights into emotional
behavior
11 hot tips that will let your data shine – Part 3: GSR

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