Compared with the well documented neurophysiological findings on negative emotions, much less is known about positive emotions. In the present study, we explored the EEG correlates of ten different positive emotions (joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe, and love). A group of 20 participants were invited to watch 30 short film clips with their EEGs simultaneously recorded. Distinct topographical patterns for different positive emotions were found for the correlation coefficients between the subjective ratings on the ten positive emotions per film clip and the corresponding EEG spectral powers in different frequency bands. Based on the similarities of the participants’ ratings on the ten positive emotions, these emotions were further clustered into three representative clusters, as ‘encouragement’ for awe, gratitude, hope, inspiration, pride, ‘playfulness’ for amusement, joy, interest, and ‘harmony’ for love, serenity. Using the EEG spectral powers as features, both the binary classification on the higher and lower ratings on these positive emotions and the binary classification between the three positive emotion clusters, achieved accuracies of approximately 80% and above. To our knowledge, our study provides the first piece of evidence on the EEG correlates of different positive emotions.

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Quantitative assessment for cognitive load and mental stress is very important in optimizing human-computer system designs to improve performance and efficiency. Traditional physiological measures, such as heart rate variation (HRV), blood pressure and electrodermal activity (EDA), are widely used but still have limitations in sensitivity, reliability and usability. In this study, we propose a novel photoplethysmogram-based stress induced vascular index (sVRI) to measure cognitive load and stress. We also provide the basic methodology and detailed algorithm framework. We employed a classic experiment with three levels of task difficulty and three stages of testing period to verify the new measure. Compared with the blood pressure, heart rate and HRV components recorded simultaneously, the sVRI reached the same level of significance on the effect of task difficulty/period as the most significant other measure. Our findings showed sVRI's potential as a sensitive, reliable and usable parameter.

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