Emotion assessment by variability-based ranking of coherence features from EEG

Abstract

The automatic assessment of emotional states has important applications in human-computer interfaces and marketing. Several approaches use a dimensional characterization of emotional states along with features extracted from physiological signals to classify emotions elicited from complex audiovisual stimuli; however, the classification accuracy remains low. Here, we develop an emotion assessment approach using a variability-based ranking scheme to reveal relevant coherence features from electroencephalography (EEG) signals. Our method achieves higher classification accuracies than comparable state-of-the-art methods and almost matches the performance of multimodal strategies that require information from several physiological signals.