Patterns of Cardiorespiratory Activity Associated with Five Basic Emotions

Affective interaction is the inexorable trend of the development of natural interaction. Physiological computing provides a new approach to understand the physiological and emotional states of users. However, there is no scientific consensus on whether there exists a stable relation between emotional states and the physiological responses. The present study review the recent research on physiological responses of autonomic nervous system activity in emotion and addressed to investigate the profile of autonomic nervous responses during the experience of five basic emotions: sadness, happiness, fear, anger, surprise and neutral. ECG and respiratory activity of fourteen healthy volunteers was recorded with BIOPAC SYSTEM MP150 during their reading passages with five basic emotional tones and neutral tone. Twelve indexes computed off-line from ECG and respiratory activities were employed as dependent variables for statistic analysis. The results indicate that significant or marginal differences are detected between the neutral and four basic emotions, except for sadness. The physiological patterns of the five basic emotions are different. Therefore, these results provide the positive evidence for the notion that the distinct patterns of peripheral physiological activity are associated with different emotions. The findings also indicate that it is feasible and effective to recognize users’ affective states based on physiological response patterns of ECG and respiratory activities.