Effects of emotion on physiological signals

Emotions and affect are universal means of expressing the physiological state of an individual. Most of our daily interactions with other individuals involve emotions as an integral part. It has become highly prominent in technological research, as new technologies related to human-machine interaction or medical applications are developed. Detecting and analyzing emotions have become quite an important area of research. In this paper, we took the effort to find the effect of different emotions on physiological signals. We used International Affective Picture System (IAPS) database images as stimuli. We have considered five different types of emotions — High Valence High Arousal (HVHA), High Valence Low Arousal (HVLA), Low Valence High Arousal (LVHA), Low Valence Low Arousal (LVLA), and Neutral (Blank), and we have used six different physiological signals — Skin Conductance (SC), Electro CardioGram (ECG), Electro MyoGram (EMG), Skin Temperature (ST), Respiration Rate (RR), and Arterial Pulse Rate (PR). Our experiment shows that there are enough variations in different parameters of physiological signals for different emotional stimuli.