This systematic literature review delves into the extensive landscape of emotion recognition, sentiment analysis, and affective computing, analyzing 609 articles. Exploring the intricate relationships among these research domains, and leveraging data from four well-established sources—IEEE, Science Direct, Springer, and MDPI—this systematic review classifies studies in four modalities based on the types of data analyzed. These modalities are unimodal, multi-physical, multi-physiological, and multi-physical–physiological. After the classification, key insights about applications, learning models, and data sources are extracted and analyzed. This review highlights the exponential growth in studies utilizing EEG signals for emotion recognition, and the potential of multimodal approaches combining physical and physiological signals to enhance the accuracy and practicality of emotion recognition systems. This comprehensive overview of research advances, emerging trends, and limitations from 2018 to 2023 underscores the importance of continued exploration and interdisciplinary collaboration in these rapidly evolving fields.

Emotion recognition based on electroencephalogram signals (EEG) has been analyzed extensively in different applications, most of them using medical-grade equipment in laboratories. The trend in human-centered artificial intelligence applications is toward using portable sensors with reduced size and improved portability that can be taken to real life scenarios, which requires systems that efficiently analyze information in real time. Currently, there is no specific set of features or specific number of electrodes defined to classify specific emotions using EEG signals, and performance may be improved with the combination of all available features but could result in high dimensionality and even worse performance; to solve the problem of high dimensionality, this paper proposes the use of genetic algorithms (GA) to automatically search the optimal subset of EEG data for emotion classification. Publicly available EEG data with 2548 features describing the waves related to different emotional states are analyzed, and then reduced to 49 features with genetic algorithms. The results show that only 49 features out of the 2548 can be sufficient to create machine learning (ML) classification models with, using algorithms such as k-nearest neighbor (KNN), random forests (RF) and artificial neural networks (ANN), obtaining results with 90.06%, 93.62% and 95.87% accuracy, respectively, which are higher than the 87.16% and 89.38% accuracy of previous works.

This research centers around utilizing artificial intelligence and data analysis to design a model capable of detecting the emotion of fear in women, this, using facial expressions and physiological signals obtained from non-intrusive sensors. The primary goal is to address the security concerns impacting women in shared transportation services in Mexico.