Effect of meditation on emotional response: An EEG-based study

Meditation is one of the accepted practices to flourish in life. Emotional harmony is essential for personal well-being. In this paper, the effect of meditation on emotional response using EEG is investigated. The simple meditative technique such as focused attention on breathing is taught to the subjects. EEG is recorded at the beginning of meditation experiment and after eight weeks of regular meditation (every day 20 min). EEG signals are recorded using 14 electrodes EMOTIV EPOC+ device. The asymmetry of band power (theta, alpha and beta band) and Hjorth features are used as emotion-specific EEG features. The average effect of these features is more on frontal asymmetry. EEG functional connectivity of selected brain regions during four emotions (Happy, Angry, Sad, and Relax) in pre and post-meditation state is examined. The results revealed that more coherence in the post-meditation is found for all emotions. The K-Nearest Neighbors (K-NN) classifier is used and emotion classification accuracy after 8 weeks of meditation is decreased. This indicates the divergence of four emotions (happy, angry, sad, and relax) are less as a result of increased awareness and reduced aversion in the 11 subjects after 8 weeks of meditation.