Neurocinematics based on passive BCI: Decoding temporal change of emotional arousal during video watching from multi-channel EEG

In the present study, we investigated whether EEG indices derived from passive brain-computer interfaces can be used to track emotional arousal changes during continuous EEG recording. Global synchronization index (GFS), a measure known to reflect human cognitive process, was evaluated to quantify the global synchronization of multichannel EEG data recorded from a group of participants while they were watching two short video clips. The two video clips were about 5-min long each and designed to respectively evoke happy and fearful emotions. Other participants were asked to select two most impressive scenes in each clip, and the questionnaire results were then compared to the grand averaged GFS waveforms. Our results showed that beta-band GFS value was decreased when people experienced high emotional arousal regardless of the types of emotional stimuli, suggesting that the GFS measure might be used as a new index to track emotional changes during video watching and would be potentially used for evaluating movies, TV commercials, and other broadcast products.