Decoding subjective emotional arousal from EEG during an immersive virtual reality experience

Abstract

Immersive virtual reality (VR) enables naturalistic neuroscientific studies while maintaining experimental control, but dynamic and interactive stimuli pose methodological challenges. We here probed the link between emotional arousal, a fundamental property of affective experience, and parieto-occipital alpha power under naturalistic stimulation: 37 young healthy adults completed an immersive VR experience, which included rollercoaster rides, while their EEG was recorded. They then continuously rated their subjective emotional arousal while viewing a replay of their experience. The association between emotional arousal and parieto-occipital alpha power was tested and confirmed by (1) decomposing the continuous EEG signal while maximizing the comodulation between alpha power and arousal ratings and by (2) decoding periods of high and low arousal with discriminative common spatial patterns and a Long Short-Term Memory recurrent neural network. We successfully combine EEG and a naturalistic immersive VR experience to extend previous findings on the neurophysiology of emotional arousal towards real-world neuroscience.

Cardiac–Brain Dynamics Depend on Context Familiarity and Their Interaction Predicts Experience of Emotional Arousal

“…In addition, the interaction between cardiac activity and familiarity significantly predicted lower beta activity in the left PO regions and alpha activity in the right PO regions. The influence of cardiac activity on PO regions is reported in experiments with naturalistic stimuli [ 2 ], the heartbeat counting task [ 22 ], and emotional stimuli [ 69 ]. For instance, PO alpha-band activity modulation was correlated with attention to the heart and the interoceptive heartbeat counting task [ 22 ].…”

“…For instance, PO alpha-band activity modulation was correlated with attention to the heart and the interoceptive heartbeat counting task [ 22 ]. With an ecologically valid experimental setting, the experience of arousal during the virtual reality experience of the rollercoaster ride was associated with the activity in the parietooccipital (PO) electrodes in the alpha band [ 2 ]. In a cue-based repetition suppression paradigm, in which a cue facilitated the context familiarity of emotional pictures, a significant reduction in alpha power over PO regions due to the expected facial expression was reported [ 55 ].…”

“…Recently, there has been a shift towards the use of more naturalistic stimuli to probe the neural dynamics of emotions [ 1 ]. The stimuli used in such studies include virtual reality-based immersive experiences [ 2 ], emotional movie clips [ 3 ], and emotionally salient films [ 4 ]. These stimuli offer a better probe to track task-related neural responses, autonomic responses, and subjective feedback in a realistic and dynamic environment.…”

“…Emotion-related EEG studies have attempted to understand the role of different frequency bands and brain regions in emotion processing [ 2 , 20 , 21 , 22 ]. For instance, synchronized gamma band activity in the prefrontal (PF) cortex is reported for the emotional information processing while watching emotional film clips, especially activity in the left frontal cortex [ 20 ].…”

“…For instance, spectral power in the alpha band over PO regions was higher while attending to the heart compared to the visual task and was associated with the subjective performance in the interoceptive task [ 22 ]. With an ecologically valid experimental setting, the experience of arousal during a virtual reality experience of the rollercoaster ride was associated with the activity in the parietooccipital (PO) electrodes in the alpha band [ 2 ]. Hence, in this exploratory study, we focused on the PF, FC, and PO regions to investigate the relationship between cardiac and brain activity during the processing of naturalistic emotional stimuli potentially influenced by the context familiarity.…”