Decoding subjective emotional arousal from eeg during an immersive virtual reality experience

Abstract
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Abstract

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.

Data availability

We did not obtain participants' consent to release their individual data. Since our analyses focus on the single-subject level, we have only limited data which are sufficiently anonymized (e.g., summarized or averaged) to be publicly shared. Wherever possible, we provide "source data" to reproduce the manuscript's tables and figures (Figures 2, 4, 8 and 10). The scripts of all analyses are available at https://github.com/SHEscher/NeVRo

Article and author information

Author details

Simon M Hofmann

Neurology, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany

For correspondence
simon.hofmann@cbs.mpg.de

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-0958-501X
Felix Klotzsche

Neurology, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany

For correspondence
klotzsche@cbs.mpg.de

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-3985-2481
Alberto Mariola

Informatics, University of Sussex, Brighton, United Kingdom

For correspondence
a.mariola@sussex.ac.uk

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Vadim Nikulin

Department of Neurology, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Arno Villringer

Neurology, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Michael Gaebler

Department of Neurology, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany

For correspondence
gaebler@cbs.mpg.de

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

Funding

Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (13GW0206)

Felix Klotzsche
Michael Gaebler

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Ethics

Human subjects: Participants signed informed consent before their participation, and the study was approved by the Ethics Committee of the Department of Psychology at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (vote no. 2017-22).

Copyright

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.