Electroencephalograph Estimation Method of Measuring "Empathic Understanding"

It is important for health care staff to understand patients\´ emotion and affective changes. Health care staffs should understand the patients\´ world as if this was his her own. This is called "empathic understanding". To understand the emotional process, electroencephalograph recording (EEG) was performed on five healthy participants while watching the sentimental movie which was 24-minutes long. The EEG changes during the emotional scenes were collected and compared with emotionally stable states. By using power map and spectrogram analyses of EEG, alpha bands at the occipital region were seen specifically among the emotionally impressed states. It seemed that the changes indicated the objective expression of empathic understanding. We suggest that EEG with power map and spectrogram analyses is a useful fundamental tool for developing a second generation computer system adjusted to the changes of one\´s mind. However, further examinations to remove artifacts among the EEG results are needed.