Exploring Gender Differences in EEG-Based Emotion Recognition with Haptic Vibration

The study of gender differences in emotions has attracted interest in psychology and neuroscience for decades. However, gender differences in the emotions evoked by haptic stimuli still need to be investigated further. In this paper, we applied visual-auditory-haptic fusion stimuli to evoke four target emotions (joy, sadness, fear, and neutral), and the electroen-cephalogram (EEG) signals were recorded synchronously. The differential entropy (DE) feature was extracted, and the support vector machine (SVM) was employed for emotion classification. Experimental results indicated that females generally behaved with lower brain activation changes than males in most frequency bands and brain regions. Meanwhile, haptic stimuli improved emotion classification accuracy, especially for females. In addition, females showed greater individual differences than males, and haptic stimuli reduced the differences in the same gender, particularly in males. This research promises to facilitate the application of emotion recognition in haptic interactions.