EVALUATING THE EFFECTS OF THE AUTONOMIC NERVOUS SYSTEM AND SYMPATHETIC ACTIVITY ON EMOTIONAL STATES

Creative Commons License

Patlar Akbulut F.

İstanbul Ticaret Üniversitesi Fen Bilimleri Dergisi, cilt.21, sa.41, ss.156-169, 2022 (TRDizin)

Özet

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.