Original title: Understanding emotional and behavioural responses through physiological signal analysis recorded during theatrical performance
Aditi Site, Annariina Lohiranta, Tarmo Lipping · September 2026
Live theatre can deeply move people and support mental well-being, but tracking audience emotions in real time is hard because viewers cannot constantly pause to label their feelings. To study this, researchers tracked audience members during an actual live play using body sensors. These sensors tracked physical signs like heart rate and skin conductance level, which measures tiny changes in sweat linked to arousal. By comparing bodily shifts to specific scenes, the team saw clear patterns. Dramatic, surprising, and intense moments caused the strongest physical reactions, often driving up heart rate and sweat levels at the same time. Humorous parts sparked moderate-to-high arousal, especially alongside loud sounds or sudden actions. In contrast, scenes focused on empathy brought lower, steadier bodily responses. Across the audience, physical reactions peaked together around the play's key emotional events.
You are watching a movie with a friend who is wearing a fitness tracker. You want to know which scenes truly affect them, but you don't want to pause and ask. So you watch their heart rate and sweat levels instead. When a jump scare happens, their heart rate spikes; during a slow emotional scene, it stays steady. In this paper, the same idea is applied to a live theatre audience, using heart rate and sweat sensors to find which moments make the whole audience's bodies react together.
For theatre makers, this means knowing which moments genuinely engage an audience, not just which ones feel moving. For researchers, it shows that physiological signals can be read in messy, real-world settings without lab conditions. That opens the door to studying emotions in everyday experiences like concerts, films, and museums.
The abstract does not report statistical significance tests or a comparison against a control condition, so the observed patterns are descriptive. It also does not specify the demographic breakdown or the size of the audience, making it hard to generalize beyond this particular performance. The study shows that HR and SCL change with scene type, but it does not establish which specific emotion is being felt, since both fear and excitement can raise heart rate.
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Understanding emotional and behavioural responses through physiological signal analysis recorded during theatrical performance — Aditi Site, Annariina Lohiranta, Tarmo Lipping
Abstract licence: CC0
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.