fNIRS Evidence for Recognizably Different Positive Emotions

The behavioral differentiation of positive emotions has recently been studied in terms of their discrete adaptive functions or appraising profiles. Some preliminary neurophysiological evidences have been found with electroencephalography or autonomic nervous system measurements such as heart rate, skin conductance, etc. However, the brain’s hemodynamic responses to different positive emotions remain largely unknown. In the present study, the functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) technique was employed. With this tool, we for the first time reported recognizable discrete positive emotions using fNIRS signals. Thirteen participants watched 30 emotional video clips to elicit 10 typical kinds of positive emotions (joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe, and love), and their frontal neural activities were simultaneously recorded with a 24-channel fNIRS system. The multidimensional scaling analysis of participants’ subjective ratings on these 10 positive emotions revealed three distinct clusters, which could be interpreted as “playfulness” for amusement, joy, interest, “encouragement” for awe, gratitude, hope, inspiration, pride, and “harmony” for love, serenity. Hemodynamic responses to these three positive emotion clusters showed distinct patterns, and HbO-based individual-level binary classifications between them achieved an averaged accuracy of 73.79 ± 11.49% (77.56 ± 7.39% for encouragement vs. harmony, 73.29 ± 11.87% for playfulness vs. harmony, 70.51 ± 13.96% for encouragement vs. harmony). Benefited from fNIRS’s high portability, low running cost and the relative robustness against motion and electrical artifacts, our findings provided support for implementing a more fine-grained emotion recognition system with subdivided positive emotion categories.