Exploring EEG Characteristics to Identify Emotional Reactions under Videogame Scenarios

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.