Extraction of brain function activities dependent on the emotional context of animation

Abstract

Engineering for estimating human emotions based on cognitive science are recently applied to neuromarketing and so on. In this study, we focused on the extraction of specific brain activities accompanying the emotional context of video contents. Brain activity was measured from the forehead by using wearable fNIRS. In order to reduce the influence of the stress with measurement environment and the influence of contents other than the alternative scene part, expected to induce emotional activity, every contents consist of the same characters and scene place. In addition, the video contents was composed in monochrome without sounds. As a result, the cerebral blood flow was remarkably reduced accompanied with viewing the alternative scene part expected to evoke sorrow emotion, in which the characters crying. Significant difference was observed in the brain activity between in watching the video with sorrow scene and the scrambled video without any emotional contexts. These results suggest that the activity of the frontal lobe is suppressed by seeing negative emotional scene.