Evaluating the Effects of the Autonomic Nervous System and Sympathetic Activity on Emotional States

Abstract

Emotion recognition has attracted more interest by being applied in many application areas from different domains such as medical diagnosis, e-commerce, and robotics. This research quantifies the stimulated short-term effect of emotions on the autonomic nervous system and sympathetic activity. The primary purpose of this study is to investigate the responses of 21 adults by attaching a wearable system to measure physiological data such as an electrocardiogram and electrodermal activity in a controlled environment. Cardiovascular effects were evaluated with heart rate variability indices that included HR, HRV triangular-index, rMSSD (ms), pNN5O (%); frequency analysis of the very low frequency (VLF: 0-0,04 Hz), low frequency (LF: 0,04-0,15 Hz), and high frequency (HF: 0,15-0,4 Hz) components; nonlinear analysis. The sympathetic activity was evaluated with time-varying and time-invariant spectral analysis results of the EDA. The participants who experience calmness had a 4,8% lower heart rate (75,06±16,76 and 78,72±16,52) observed compared to happiness. Negative valance with high-arousal emotions like anger was invariably responded to with a peak in skin conductance level. Besides, negative valance with low-arousal emotions like sadness was allied with a drop in conductance level. Anger, in addition to being the most well-known emotion, elicited coherent time-varying spectral responses.