Methodological Issues in Electrodermal Measurement

Abstract

Electrodermal recording has been extensively used for more than a century, but serious attempts to standardize recording and evaluation have not been performed since the early seventies. The Society for Psychophysiological Research has published a consensus of an expert committee (Fowles, Christie, Edelberg, Grings, Lykken, & Venables, 1981). Despite this, conflicting methodology still persists in electrodermal research and application. Perhaps this is in part the result of the committee’s concentration on electrodes, jelly, placement, and preparation of sites. On the other hand, some central issues which had been raised by (1967) and by (1971), have not attracted much attention of the commission. The aim of this paper is to bring up these issues again, in order to discuss recommendations given earlier with respect to more recent empirical work.