Affective Modelling of Users in HCI Using EEG

Emotions have potential to play a role in HCI which is primarily dominated by cognitive measures. Human physiological communication channels are dominated by emotions. Emotion affects several human activities like communication, learning, decision making, cognition, perception etc. Further, as emotions are difficult to interpret and hard to measure, technologists and designers have been struggling to incorporate them in design and technology. On the other hand, advancement of technology has both necessitated and enabled us to understand emotions and put them to use in contexts like human computer interaction. This study reports an attempt to model emotions by means of electroencephalography (EEG). Video stimuli of four representative basic emotions based on Navarasa theory of Ancient Indian treatise called Natya Shastra were shown to participants and EEG data was collected. Power spectrum analysis of EEG signals associated with emotions was done. Further, the EEG analysis findings were compared with the subject's self-reports about their emotional states during the experiment. EEG results have shown significantly consistent frequency patterns across the brain lobes for a given emotion. This study suggests that human emotions can be modeled for use in HCI either as an affect assessment tool or for affect based intelligent interactions.