TY - JOUR TI - Decoding subjective emotional arousal from EEG during an immersive virtual reality experience AU - Hofmann, Simon M AU - Klotzsche, Felix AU - Mariola, Alberto AU - Nikulin, Vadim AU - Villringer, Arno AU - Gaebler, Michael A2 - Shackman, Alexander A2 - Baker, Chris I A2 - König, Peter VL - 10 PY - 2021 DA - 2021/10/28 SP - e64812 C1 - eLife 2021;10:e64812 DO - 10.7554/eLife.64812 UR - https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.64812 AB - Immersive virtual reality (VR) enables naturalistic neuroscientific studies while maintaining experimental control, but dynamic and interactive stimuli pose methodological challenges. We here probed the link between emotional arousal, a fundamental property of affective experience, and parieto-occipital alpha power under naturalistic stimulation: 37 young healthy adults completed an immersive VR experience, which included rollercoaster rides, while their EEG was recorded. They then continuously rated their subjective emotional arousal while viewing a replay of their experience. The association between emotional arousal and parieto-occipital alpha power was tested and confirmed by (1) decomposing the continuous EEG signal while maximizing the comodulation between alpha power and arousal ratings and by (2) decoding periods of high and low arousal with discriminative common spatial patterns and a long short-term memory recurrent neural network. We successfully combine EEG and a naturalistic immersive VR experience to extend previous findings on the neurophysiology of emotional arousal towards real-world neuroscience. KW - machine learning KW - affective computing KW - deep learning KW - ecological validity KW - naturalistic stimuli KW - computational affective neuroscience JF - eLife SN - 2050-084X PB - eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd ER -