Facial Electromyography and Its Relation With Emotional States

Emotional experiences play a fundamental role in our physical and mental health, which makes the importance of emotional intelligence for our wellbeing undeniable. Thus, the identification and recognition of emotions have become the focus of many scientific studies, that include, among others, the development of systems capable of recognizing and responding to human emotions.Particularly, the study in this project focuses on the construction of an emotional identification system based on the processing and analysis of facial electromyography signals. These signals underwent various processes that enhanced their characteristics and selected those that best described the emotional states of fear and happiness. Some steps worth of mentioning are: filtering, rectification, trend removal, and the identification of the M waves. The implementation of a random forest algorithm considering as input the features derived from the M waves demonstrated their value in emotion identification.