Emotional Influence on SSVEP Based BCI

The objective of the paper is to investigate the effect of subject´s emotional states on Brain Computer Interface (BCI) performance. Two psycho-physiological experiments are designed and implemented. The first one induces subjects´ emotion using video clips first, then involves subjects´ in SSVEP task. The second one induces subjects´ emotions and SSVEP simultaneously by flickering IAPS pictures in four directions. used to recognize the performed BCI tasks. Based on the performances of learned classifiers, we analyzed the influence of emotion using two statistical tests. The McNamara´s test serves to assess if emotion has any influences on mental task performing while Wilcox on signed-rank test analyses if emotion has a positive or detrimental effect on ability to achieve a SSVEP task. Obtained results suggest influence of emotional states: the positive and neutral emotions influence BCI performance similarly, while the negative emotion tends to deteriorate classification accuracy.