Whether different affective states have specific physiological activation patterns still does not have an
exact interpretation and clear validation. Skin Conductance Response (SCR) is under strict control of
the autonomic nervous system, providing an efficient way to measure the emotional reactions. Since the
emotional SCR signals are always short and noisy, it is of great value to study the methods suitable
for short-term SCR analysis. According to the characteristic of SCR signal, we proposed a symbolic
method and the symbolic information entropy, further, applied the method to analyse emotional SCR
signals. Experiment results show that the symbolic information entropy of SCR is in accordance with
the arousal level of emotions, and SCR is more sensitive to the variations of emotional arousal rather
than to valence. Symbolic information entropy is less influenced by noise and non-stationary, providing
an effective method in analyzing SCR signals or other complex physiological signals.
