Electrophysiological representations of multivariate human emotion experience

ABSTRACT

Despite the fact that human daily emotions are co-occurring by nature, most neuroscience studies have primarily adopted a univariate approach to identify the neural representation of emotion (emotion experience within a single emotion category) without adequate consideration of the co-occurrence of different emotions (emotion experience across different emotion categories simultaneously). To investigate the neural representations of multivariate emotion experience, this study employed the inter-situation representational similarity analysis (RSA) method. Researchers used an EEG dataset of 78 participants who watched 28 video clips and rated their experience on eight emotion categories. The EEG-based electrophysiological representation was extracted as the power spectral density (PSD) feature per channel in the five frequency bands. The inter-situation RSA method revealed significant correlations between the multivariate emotion experience ratings and PSD features in the Alpha and Beta bands, primarily over the frontal and parietal-occipital brain regions. The study found the identified EEG representations to be reliable with sufficient situations and participants. Moreover, through a series of ablation analyses, the inter-situation RSA further demonstrated the stability and specificity of the EEG representations for multivariate emotion experience. These findings highlight the importance of adopting a multivariate perspective for a comprehensive understanding of the neural representation of human emotion experience.

KEYWORDS:

• EEG
• multivariate emotion experience
• representational similarity analysis
• inter-situation
• video watching

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In the present study, we use the “multivariate emotion experience” to represent the co-occurring pattern across multiple emotion categories, and the “univariate emotion experience” corresponds to the emotion experience within a single emotion category. Specifically, each emotion category is considered as one variate.

2 The data are available via https://osf.io/cfygx/. This study's design and its analysis were not preregistered.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under grant number 61977041; Tsinghua University Spring Breeze Fund under grant number 2021Z99CFY037; the grant from Institute Guo Qiang, Tsinghua University; and Tsinghua University Initiative Scientific Research Program under Grant 20197010009.