Design of an Emotion Elicitation Framework for Arabic Speakers Sharifa Alghowinem 1,3 , Sarah Alghuwinem 4 , Majdah Alshehri 5 , Areej Alwabil 5 , Roland Goecke 2,1 , and Michael Wagner 2,1 1 Australian National University, Research School of Computer Science, Canberra, Australia 2 University of Canberra, Human-Centred Computing Laboratory, Canberra, Australia 3 Ministry of Higher Education: Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, 4 Princess Noura Bint Abdulrahman University, Social Science College, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia 5 King Saud University, Human-Computer Interaction Group, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia sharifa.alghowinem@anu.edu.au, sarah.alghuwinem@gmail.com, amajdah@ksu.edu.sa, aalwabil@ksu.edu.sa, roland.goecke@ieee.org, michael.wagner@canberra.edu.au Abstract. The automatic detection of human affective states has been of great interest lately for its applications not only in the field of Human- Computer Interaction, but also for its applications in physiological, neu- robiological and sociological studies. Several standardized techniques to elicit emotions have been used, with emotion eliciting movie clips being the most popular. To date, there are only four studies that have been carried out to validate emotional movie clips using three different lan- guages (English, French, Spanish) and cultures (French, Italian, British / American). The context of language and culture is an underexplored area in affective computing. Considering cultural and language differ- ences between Western and Arab countries, it is possible that some of the validated clips, even when dubbed, will not achieve similar results. Given the unique and conservative cultures of the Arab countries, a stan- dardized and validated framework for affect studies is needed in order to be comparable with current studies of different cultures and languages. In this paper, we describe a framework and its prerequisites for eliciting emotions that could be used for affect studies on an Arab population. We present some aspects of Arab culture values that might affect the selec- tion and acceptance of emotion eliciting video clips. Methods for rating and validating Arab emotional clips are presented to derive at a list of clips that could be used in the proposed emotion elicitation framework. A pilot study was conducted to evaluate a basic version of our framework, which showed great potential to succeed in eliciting emotions. Keywords: Emotion elicitation framework, Arabic emotion data collec- tion, emotional movie clips 1 Introduction Emotions have been widely investigated lately for their importance not only to psychology, neurobiology and sociology, but also for affective computing studies. Affective computing is the study of automatic detection of human emotional states, which has seen much interest lately for its multidisciplinary applications.