To satisfy the need to accurately monitor emotional stress, this paper explores the effectiveness of the attention mechanism based on the deep learning model CNN (Convolutional Neural Networks)-BiLSTM (Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory) As different attention mechanisms can cause the framework to focus on different positions of the feature map, this discussion adds attention mechanisms to the CNN layer and the BiLSTM layer separately, and to both the CNN layer and BiLSTM layer simultaneously to generate different CNN–BiLSTM networks with attention mechanisms. ECG (electrocardiogram) data from 34 subjects were collected on the server platform created by the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Science and the researches. It verifies that the average accuracy of CNN–BiLSTM is up to 0.865 without any attention mechanism, while the highest average accuracy of 0.868 is achieved using the CNN–attention–based BiLSTM.