Unraveling the Development of an Algorithm for Recognizing Primary Emotions Through Electroencephalography

Abstract

The large range of potential applications, not only for patients but also for healthy people, that could be achieved by affective brain–computer interface (aBCI) makes more latent the necessity of finding a commonly accepted protocol for real-time EEG-based emotion recognition. Based on wavelet package for spectral feature extraction, attending to the nature of the EEG signal, we have specified some of the main parameters needed for the implementation of robust positive and negative emotion classification. Twelve seconds has resulted as the most appropriate sliding window size; from that, a set of 20 target frequency-location variables have been proposed as the most relevant features that carry the emotional information. Lastly, QDA and KNN classifiers and population rating criterion for stimuli labeling have been suggested as the most suitable approaches for EEG-based emotion recognition. The proposed model reached a mean accuracy of 98% (s.d. 1.4) and 98.96% (s.d. 1.28) in a subject-dependent (SD) approach for QDA and KNN classifier, respectively. This new model represents a step forward towards real-time classification. Moreover, new insights regarding subject-independent (SI) approximation have been discussed, although the results were not conclusive.