With the popularity and advancement of the Internet and video-sharing platforms, video affective content analysis has greatly developed. Temporal information is crucial for this task. Nevertheless, existing methods often overlook the fact that there is substantial irrelevant information in videos and that the importance of modalities is uneven for emotional tasks. This could result in noise from both temporal fragments and modalities, reducing the model's ability to identify crucial temporal fragments and recognize emotions. To tackle the above issues, we propose a Temporal Enhancement (TE) method in this paper. Specifically, we utilize three encoders for extracting features at various levels and employ temporal sampling to enhance the temporal data, thereby enriching video representation and improving the model's robustness to noise. Subsequently, we design a cross-modal temporal enhancement module to enhance temporal information for every modal feature. This module interacts with multiple modalities simultaneously to emphasize critical temporal fragments while suppressing irrelevant ones. The experimental results on four benchmark datasets show that the proposed temporal enhancement method achieves state-of-the-art video affective content analysis performance. Moreover, the effectiveness of each module is confirmed through ablation experiments.

Although video affective content analysis has great potential in many applications, it has not been thoroughly studied due to limited datasets. In this paper, we construct a large-scale video affective dataset with danmu (VAD). It consists of 19,267 elaborately segmented video clips from user-generated videos. The VAD dataset is annotated by the crowdsourcing platform with discrete valence, arousal, and primary emotions, as well as the comparison of valence and arousal between two consecutive video clips. Unlike previous datasets, including only video clips, our proposed dataset also provides danmu, which is the real-time comment from users as they watch a video. Danmu provides extra information for video affective content analysis. As a preliminary assessment of the usability of our dataset, an analysis of inter-annotator consistency for each label is conducted using weighted Fleiss' Kappa, regular Fleiss' Kappa, intraclass correlation coefficient, and percent consensus. Besides, we also perform a statistical analysis of labels and danmu. Finally, video affective content analysis is conducted on our dataset and three typical methods (i.e., TFN, MulT, and MISA) are leveraged to provide benchmarks. We also demonstrate that danmu can significantly improve the performance of the video affective content analysis task on some labels. Our dataset is available for research purposes.

Although empathic interaction between counselor and client is fundamental to success in the psychotherapeutic process, there are currently few datasets to aid a computational approach to empathy understanding. In this paper, we construct a multimodal empathy dataset collected from face-to-face psychological counseling sessions. The dataset consists of 771 video clips. We also propose three labels (i.e., expression of experience, emotional reaction, and cognitive reaction) to describe the degree of empathy between counselors and their clients. Expression of experience describes whether the client has expressed experiences that can trigger empathy, and emotional and cognitive reactions indicate the counselor's empathic reactions. As an elementary assessment of the usability of the constructed multimodal empathy dataset, an interrater reliability analysis of annotators' subjective evaluations for video clips is conducted using the intraclass correlation coefficient and Fleiss' Kappa. Results prove that our data annotation is reliable. Furthermore, we conduct empathy prediction using three typical methods, including the tensor fusion network, the sentimental words aware fusion network, and a simple concatenation model. The experimental results show that empathy can be well predicted on our dataset. Our dataset is available for research purposes.