Assessment of physiological signals during happiness, sadness, pain or anger

Abstract

With the advancement of technology, non-intrusive monitoring of some physiological signals through smart watches and other wearable devices are made possible. This provides us with new opportunities of exploring newer fields of information technology applied in our everyday lives. One application which can help individuals with difficulty in expressing their emotions, e.g. autistic individuals, is emotion recognition through bio-signal processing. To develop such systems, however, a significant amount of measurement data is necessary to establish proper paradigms, which enable such analyses. Given the sparsity of the available data in the literature, specifically the ones using portable devices, we conducted a set of experiments to help in enriching the literature. In our experiments, we measured physiological signals of various subjects during four different emotional experiences; happiness, sadness, pain, and anger. Measured bio-signals are Electrodermal activity (EDA), Skin Temperature, and Heart rate. In this paper, we share our measurement results and our findings regarding their relation with happiness, sadness, anger, and pain.