Individual Classification of Emotions Using EEG

Many studies suggest that EEG signals provide enough information for the detection of human emotions with feature based classification methods. However, very few studies have reported a classification method that reliably works for individual participants (classification accuracy well over 90%). Further, a necessary condition for real life applications is a method that allows, irrespective of the immense individual difference among participants, to have minimal variance over the individual classification accuracy. We conducted offline computer aided emotion classification experiments using strict experimental controls. We analyzed EEG data collected from nine participants using validated film clips to induce four different emotional states (amused, disgusted, sad and neutral). The classification rate was evaluated using both unsupervised and supervised learning algorithms (in total seven “state of the art” algorithms were tested). The largest classification accuracy was computed by means of Support Vector Machine. Accuracy rate was on average 97.2%. The experimental protocol effectiveness was further supported by very small variance among individual participants’ classification accuracy (within interval: 96.7%, 98.3%). Classification accuracy evaluated on reduced number of electrodes suggested, consistently with psychological constructionist approaches, that we were able to classify emotions considering cortical activity from areas involved in emotion representation. The experimental protocol therefore appeared to be a key factor to improve the classification outcome by means of data quality improvements.