ANALYSIS OF PHYSIOLOGICAL PARAMETERS FOR COGNITIVE ENHANCEMENT

Abstract

Emotions are considered to be an important part of our life; they affect each and every aspect of life. Emotions are perceived by peripheral nervous system and processed in the brain and accordingly action is produced through muscle movement, facial expression, body temperature and all. In the brain, cerebrum or precisely somatosensory cortex is considered to be the emotion processing center. The following study was designed to study the electrical activation occurring in the rhythmic bands of electroencephalograph (EEG) during audio-visual stimuli. Audio-visual stimuli consists of 10 videos, two each from different categories, viz, fear, anger, funny, sad and, neutral emotional video clips. The video clips were again divided in two categories one having low intensity of emotion and second having high intensity of emotion. Their affective valence was unpleasant, neutral or pleasant, while affective arousal was calm, neutral or excited. Twenty right handed participants were made to watch emotional video clips. EEG and ECG were recorded simultaneously while watching video clips for 10 channels and 3 channels respectively. The videos were played in such an order so that video having low emotional intensity content is played first and the one having high intensity emotions are played afterwards. The Gamma, Beta, Alpha, Theta and, low Alpha rhythmic frequency bands were extracted from EEG and the average power was computed using FF1'. In ECG, RR intervals were extracted and mean RR interval was computed for i-IRV analysis. Finally, after analysis it is revealed that for fear and funny video stimuli, the EEG rhythmic band average power decreases on increasing emotional intensity in the videos, for all 10 channels over the scalp. For anger video stimuli, the EEG rhythmic band average power increases on increasing the emotional intensity in all channels except over prefrontal and central lobe. For sad emotion video stimuli, the EEG rhythmic band average power decreases on increasing the emotional intensity in all channels except over temporal and occipital lobe. In l-lRV analysis it is revealed that the RR interval decreases when a subject go through any emotion as compared to normal conditions. The anger video stimuli shows lowest RR interval and fear emotions show highest RR interval values, within emotion subset. Summing up, these results demonstrate that the variations are noted for different emotions.