Arousal

In affect and emotion research, arousal is the dimension of emotional experience that describes activation or energy level — how calm or excited a state feels — independent of whether the emotion is positive or negative (that second dimension is valence). In the widely used circumplex model of emotion, arousal runs from sleepy/calm at one pole to alert/excited at the other. Arousal is a contested construct: psychologists have noted that its physiological correlates are inconsistent, and users of emotion-aware systems often confuse arousal with loudness, intensity, or salience. In affective-captioning and haptic-feedback research, arousal is often inferred from speech via speech-emotion-recognition models and used to drive visual or haptic cue intensity, though this approach has been criticised for conceptual fuzziness and demographic bias.