Identifying Audio-Visual Familiarity Effects on Emotion via Directed Functional Connectivity

Some studies have reported that audiovisual stimuli have a significant influence on generating human emotions. In this paper, we propose to adopt directed functional connectivity to identify how emotions, in terms of high valence (HV) and low valence (LV), are affected by familiar/unfamiliar music videos. The current study applied Directed Transfer Function (DTF) to estimate connectivity between each pair of channels, followed by theoretical graph analysis (e.g., degree and strength). Our results showed that watching familiar/unfamiliar musical videos had a significant impact on emotions. First, HV showed greater functional connectivity during familiar conditions, while LV revealed stronger functional connectivity for unfamiliar tasks within the alpha and beta bands. Second, in the beta band during unfamiliar conditions, increased outflows of LV were identified at the right central, and enhanced inflows at the left frontal.