Brainwaves Analysis of Positive and Negative Emotions

Emotions, is the generic term for various subjective cognitive experiences and a psychological and physiological synthesized state generates under a variety of perceptions, thoughts, and behaviours. In general, emotion can be categorized into Joyful, Angry, Protected, Sad, Surprised, Fear, Satisfied and Unconcerned eight types of positive-negative emotions. More subtle and delicate emotions include jealousy, humiliation, shame, pride and other emotions. Emotion is often under influence of mood, personality, temperament, purpose and other factors. It can also be affected by hormones and neuro transmitters. Whether positive or negative emotions are all motivations and trigger action. Although some emotional behaviour seems take place inadvertent, however conscious plays an important role in producing emotion. This paper from the perspective of cognitive neuroscience investigates difference of human brainwave of 8 types of positive and negative emotions i.e. Joyful, Angry, Protected, Sad, Surprised, Fear, Satisfied and Unconcerned. The experiment uses acoustic stimuli to stimulate the positive and negative emotions of the test subjects and uses Electroencephalogram (EEG) to extract test subjects’ frontal lobe brainwave. The extracted brainwave is further transformed into frequency domain signal where sub-band energy is calculated, characterized, and finally digital encoded for analysis. The encoded characteristic brainwaves of positive and negative emotion are compared for theirs difference. It shows 8 different positive and negative emotions can be effectively identified by the proposed emotional brainwave digital encoding technique and the technique is promising for developing future emotion identification technique. Key-Words: Brainwave, Cognitive Neuroscience, Emotion Recognition