EEG and emotions: α-peak frequency as a quantifier for happiness

Abstract

This research investigates the relationship between the electroencephalography (EEG) signal and basic human emotions. In the first experiment, EEG signals were collected from electrodes at locations Fp1, Fp2, F3 and F4 from 4 male and 4 female test subjects while exposed to audio-visual stimuli. The stimuli were selected to evoke 4 groups of emotions i.e., sad, fear, happiness and disgust. The signals were then processed to remove artifacts using a novel modified empirical mode decomposition (EMD) technique. Subsequently, spectral features derived from the α- and β-bands were derived from the artifact-free EEG using a modified Welch periodogram technique with emphasis on finding the optimum number of Welch segments and epoch length. The hypothesis derived from the first experiment was subsequently tested on an additional 7 male subjects. It was observed that the α-peak frequency consistently had the highest magnitudes for happiness-evoked emotion for male subjects. Based on this observation, we speculate that the α-peak frequency can be used to quantify the level of happiness experienced by an individual.