Analysis of Affective Effects on Steady-State Visual Evoked Potential Responses

This paper aims to investigate the effect of different emotional states on healthy subjects' steady-state visual evoked potential responses. First, affective steady-state visual evoked response experiments are designed and implemented. Emotion eliciting pictures selected from the International Affective Picture System are flickered on the four directions of the screen at the frequency of 10Hz, 11Hz, 12Hz and 15Hz respectively. Subjects' EEG signals are recorded by a Quik-cap simultaneously. After that, spectral density analysis and canonical correlation analysis are conducted across trials respectively to extract features. Then a one-way analysis of variance is performed to evaluate the effect of different emotional states on subjects' steady-state visual evoked potential responses. Results show that there exist significant differences between steady-state visual potential response under different emotional states. Both positive and negative emotions enhance subjects' steady-state visual evoked potential responses. Thus it is easier to detect subjects response under positive and negative emotional states than that under neutral state.