A study on the changes in the autonomic nervous system and cardio-electric physiology after viewing comedy movie clip: A case study

Watching of comedy movies has been reported to alter the cardiac autonomic modulation. The study has been designed to investigate the autonomic modulation using heart rate variability (HRV) parameters. An attempt was made to understand whether the normal state can be classified from the post-stimulus state using artificial neural network (ANN) classification. Further, time domain and wavelet processed ECG signals were tried to be classified. ECG signals provide information about the cardiac physiology and the conduction pathway of the heart. The HRV results indicated sympathetic dominance after watching the comedy movie clip. A classification efficiency of 97.5 % was achieved using RBF algorithm. Time domain parameters showed a classification efficiency of 92.50% using RBF algorithm whereas the classification efficiency was 100.00 % for the wavelet processed signals using both RBF and MLP algorithms. The results indicated that watching of the comedy movies either alters the conduction pathway or the cardiac physiology.