scholarly journals Exploring EEG Characteristics to Identify Emotional Reactions under Videogame Scenarios

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 378
Author(s):  
Laura Martínez-Tejada ◽  
Alex Puertas-González ◽  
Natsue Yoshimura ◽  
Yasuharu Koike

In this article we present the study of electroencephalography (EEG) traits for emotion recognition process using a videogame as a stimuli tool, and considering two different kind of information related to emotions: arousal–valence self-assesses answers from participants, and game events that represented positive and negative emotional experiences under the videogame context. We performed a statistical analysis using Spearman’s correlation between the EEG traits and the emotional information. We found that EEG traits had strong correlation with arousal and valence scores; also, common EEG traits with strong correlations, belonged to the theta band of the central channels. Then, we implemented a regression algorithm with feature selection to predict arousal and valence scores using EEG traits. We achieved better result for arousal regression, than for valence regression. EEG traits selected for arousal and valence regression belonged to time domain (standard deviation, complexity, mobility, kurtosis, skewness), and frequency domain (power spectral density—PDS, and differential entropy—DE from theta, alpha, beta, gamma, and all EEG frequency spectrum). Addressing game events, we found that EEG traits related with the theta, alpha and beta band had strong correlations. In addition, distinctive event-related potentials where identified in the presence of both types of game events. Finally, we implemented a classification algorithm to discriminate between positive and negative events using EEG traits to identify emotional information. We obtained good classification performance using only two traits related with frequency domain on the theta band and on the full EEG spectrum.

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 164
Author(s):  
Irina E. Nicolae ◽  
Mihai Ivanovici

Texture plays an important role in computer vision in expressing the characteristics of a surface. Texture complexity evaluation is important for relying not only on the mathematical properties of the digital image, but also on human perception. Human subjective perception verbally expressed is relative in time, since it can be influenced by a variety of internal or external factors, such as: Mood, tiredness, stress, noise surroundings, and so on, while closely capturing the thought processes would be more straightforward to human reasoning and perception. With the long-term goal of designing more reliable measures of perception which relate to the internal human neural processes taking place when an image is perceived, we firstly performed an electroencephalography experiment with eight healthy participants during color textural perception of natural and fractal images followed by reasoning on their complexity degree, against single color reference images. Aiming at more practical applications for easy use, we tested this entire setting with a WiFi 6 channels electroencephalography (EEG) system. The EEG responses are investigated in the temporal, spectral and spatial domains in order to assess human texture complexity perception, in comparison with both textural types. As an objective reference, the properties of the color textural images are expressed by two common image complexity metrics: Color entropy and color fractal dimension. We observed in the temporal domain, higher Event Related Potentials (ERPs) for fractal image perception, followed by the natural and one color images perception. We report good discriminations between perceptions in the parietal area over time and differences in the temporal area regarding the frequency domain, having good classification performance.


2021 ◽  
pp. 095679762199666
Author(s):  
Sebastian Schindler ◽  
Maximilian Bruchmann ◽  
Claudia Krasowski ◽  
Robert Moeck ◽  
Thomas Straube

Our brains rapidly respond to human faces and can differentiate between many identities, retrieving rich semantic emotional-knowledge information. Studies provide a mixed picture of how such information affects event-related potentials (ERPs). We systematically examined the effect of feature-based attention on ERP modulations to briefly presented faces of individuals associated with a crime. The tasks required participants ( N = 40 adults) to discriminate the orientation of lines overlaid onto the face, the age of the face, or emotional information associated with the face. Negative faces amplified the N170 ERP component during all tasks, whereas the early posterior negativity (EPN) and late positive potential (LPP) components were increased only when the emotional information was attended to. These findings suggest that during early configural analyses (N170), evaluative information potentiates face processing regardless of feature-based attention. During intermediate, only partially resource-dependent, processing stages (EPN) and late stages of elaborate stimulus processing (LPP), attention to the acquired emotional information is necessary for amplified processing of negatively evaluated faces.


2003 ◽  
Vol 15 (8) ◽  
pp. 1135-1148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annett Schirmer ◽  
Sonja A. Kotz

The present study investigated the interaction of emotional prosody and word valence during emotional comprehension in men and women. In a prosody-word interference task, participants listened to positive, neutral, and negative words that were spoken with a happy, neutral, and angry prosody. Participants were asked to rate word valence while ignoring emotional prosody, or vice versa. Congruent stimuli were responded faster and more accurately as compared to incongruent emotional stimuli. This behavioral effect was more salient for the word valence task than for the prosodic task and was comparable between men and women. The event-related potentials (ERPs) revealed a smaller N400 amplitude for congruent as compared to emotionally incongruent stimuli. This ERP effect, however, was significant only for the word valence judgment and only for female listeners. The present data suggest that the word valence judgment was more difficult and more easily influenced by task-irrelevant emotional information than the prosodic task in both men and women. Furthermore, although emotional prosody and word valence may have a similar influence on an emotional judgment in both sexes, ERPs indicate sex differences in the underlying processing. Women, but not men, show an interaction between prosody and word valence during a semantic processing stage.


Author(s):  
Michela Balconi

Neuropsychological studies have underlined the significant presence of distinct brain correlates deputed to analyze facial expression of emotion. It was observed that some cerebral circuits were considered as specific for emotional face comprehension as a function of conscious vs. unconscious processing of emotional information. Moreover, the emotional content of faces (i.e. positive vs. negative; more or less arousing) may have an effect in activating specific cortical networks. Between the others, recent studies have explained the contribution of hemispheres in comprehending face, as a function of type of emotions (mainly related to the distinction positive vs. negative) and of specific tasks (comprehending vs. producing facial expressions). Specifically, ERPs (event-related potentials) analysis overview is proposed in order to comprehend how face may be processed by an observer and how he can make face a meaningful construct even in absence of awareness. Finally, brain oscillations is considered in order to explain the synchronization of neural populations in response to emotional faces when a conscious vs. unconscious processing is activated.


2018 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 273-280
Author(s):  
Jianfeng Wang ◽  
Yan Wu ◽  
Lushi Jing

Implicit motives play an important role in the regulation of many basic cognitive processes, particularly in the stage of attention. We conducted a study with a sample of 58 college students to examine selective attention to emotional stimuli as a function of individual differences in the implicit need for affiliation (nAff). In an affective oddball paradigm, event-related potentials were recorded while participants viewed positive, neutral, and negative images of people. Results showed that individuals high in nAff elicited larger late positive potential amplitudes to negative images than those low in nAff did. These findings replicate and extend the results of a previous study focused on these relationships and provide additional information on the neural correlates of affiliation-related emotional information processing.


Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (24) ◽  
pp. 7198
Author(s):  
Juan David Chailloux Peguero ◽  
Omar Mendoza-Montoya ◽  
Javier M. Antelis

The P300 paradigm is one of the most promising techniques for its robustness and reliability in Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) applications, but it is not exempt from shortcomings. The present work studied single-trial classification effectiveness in distinguishing between target and non-target responses considering two conditions of visual stimulation and the variation of the number of symbols presented to the user in a single-option visual frame. In addition, we also investigated the relationship between the classification results of target and non-target events when training and testing the machine-learning model with datasets containing different stimulation conditions and different number of symbols. To this end, we designed a P300 experimental protocol considering, as conditions of stimulation: the color highlighting or the superimposing of a cartoon face and from four to nine options. These experiments were carried out with 19 healthy subjects in 3 sessions. The results showed that the Event-Related Potentials (ERP) responses and the classification accuracy are stronger with cartoon faces as stimulus type and similar irrespective of the amount of options. In addition, the classification performance is reduced when using datasets with different type of stimulus, but it is similar when using datasets with different the number of symbols. These results have a special connotation for the design of systems, in which it is intended to elicit higher levels of evoked potentials and, at the same time, optimize training time.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Sosulski ◽  
Jan-Philipp Kemmer ◽  
Michael Tangermann

AbstractElectroencephalogram data used in the domain of brain–computer interfaces typically has subpar signal-to-noise ratio and data acquisition is expensive. An effective and commonly used classifier to discriminate event-related potentials is the linear discriminant analysis which, however, requires an estimate of the feature distribution. While this information is provided by the feature covariance matrix its large number of free parameters calls for regularization approaches like Ledoit–Wolf shrinkage. Assuming that the noise of event-related potential recordings is not time-locked, we propose to decouple the time component from the covariance matrix of event-related potential data in order to further improve the estimates of the covariance matrix for linear discriminant analysis. We compare three regularized variants thereof and a feature representation based on Riemannian geometry against our proposed novel linear discriminant analysis with time-decoupled covariance estimates. Extensive evaluations on 14 electroencephalogram datasets reveal, that the novel approach increases the classification performance by up to four percentage points for small training datasets, and gracefully converges to the performance of standard shrinkage-regularized LDA for large training datasets. Given these results, practitioners in this field should consider using our proposed time-decoupled covariance estimation when they apply linear discriminant analysis to classify event-related potentials, especially when few training data points are available.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Baum ◽  
Milena Rabovsky ◽  
Sebastian Benjamin Rose ◽  
Rasha Abdel Rahman

Affective information about other people’s social behavior may prejudice social interactions and bias person judgments. The trustworthiness of person-related information, however, can vary considerably, as in the case of gossip, rumours, lies, or so-called “fake news”. Here, we investigated how spontaneous person-likability and explicit person judgments are influenced by trustworthiness, employing event-related potentials as indexes of emotional brain responses. Social-emotional information about the (im)moral behaviour of previously unknown persons was verbally presented as trustworthy fact, (e.g. “He bullied his apprentice”) or marked as untrustworthy gossip (by adding e.g. allegedly), using verbal qualifiers that are frequently used in conversations, news and social media to indicate the questionable trustworthiness of the information and as a precaution against wrong accusations. In Experiment 1, spontaneous likability, deliberate person judgments and electrophysiological measures of emotional person evaluation were strongly influenced by negative information, yet remarkably unaffected by the trustworthiness of the information. Experiment 2 replicated these findings and extended them to positive information. Our findings demonstrate a tendency for strong emotional evaluations and person judgments even when they are knowingly based on unclear evidence.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Di Yang ◽  
Hengheng Tao ◽  
Hongxing Ge ◽  
Zuoshan Li ◽  
Yuanyan Hu ◽  
...  

Abstract BackgroundSocial impairment is a defining phenotypic feature of autism. The present study investigated whether individuals with autistic traits exhibit altered perceptions of social emotions. MethodsTwo groups of participants (High-AQ and Low-AQ) were recruited based on their scores on the autism-spectrum quotient (AQ). Their behavioral responses and event-related potentials (ERP) elicited by social and nonsocial stimuli with positive, negative, and neutral emotional valence were compared in two experiments. In Experiment 1, participants were instructed to view social-emotional and nonsocial-emotional pictures. In Experiment 2, participants were instructed to listen to social-emotional and nonsocial-emotional audio recordings. ResultsMore negative emotional reactions and smaller amplitudes of late ERP components (the late positive potential in Experiment 1 and the late negative component in Experiment 2) were found in the High-AQ group than in the Low-AQ group in response to the social-negative stimuli. In addition, amplitudes of these late ERP components in both experiments elicited in response to social-negative stimuli were correlated with the AQ scores of the High-AQ group. LimitationsAlthough the influence of autistic traits on reactions to social or nonsocial emotional stimuli was assessed in an experimental setting, whether and how these reactions are related to real-world behavior requires further investigation. In addition, filler trials should be used to evaluate whether participants focused sufficiently on the emotional stimuli. ConclusionThese results suggest that individuals with autistic traits have altered emotional processing of social-negative emotions.


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