EEG signals have been reported to be informative and reliable for emotion recognition in recent years. However, the inter-subject variability of emotion-related EEG signals still poses a great challenge for the practical applications of EEG-based emotion recognition. Inspired by recent neuroscience studies on inter-subject correlation, we proposed a Contrastive Learning method for Inter-Subject Alignment (CLISA) to tackle the cross-subject emotion recognition problem. Contrastive learning was employed to minimize the inter-subject differences by maximizing the similarity in EEG signal representations across subjects when they received the same emotional stimuli in contrast to different ones. Specifically, a convolutional neural network was applied to learn inter-subject aligned spatiotemporal representations from EEG time series in contrastive learning. The aligned representations were subsequently used to extract differential entropy features for emotion classification. CLISA achieved state-of-the-art cross-subject emotion recognition performance on our THU-EP dataset with 80 subjects and the publicly available SEED dataset with 15 subjects. It could generalize to unseen subjects or unseen emotional stimuli in testing. Furthermore, the spatiotemporal representations learned by CLISA could provide insights into the neural mechanisms of human emotion processing.

This article presents a robust adaptive neural control algorithm for the wing-sail-assisted vehicle to track the desired waypoint-based route, where the event-triggered mechanism is with the multiport form. The main features of the proposed algorithm are three-fold: 1) the communication burden, in the channel from the sensor to the controller as well as the actuator, has been reduced for the merits of the multiport event-triggered approach. The feedback error signals and the control input will be updated only on the event-triggered time point; 2) for the wing-sail-assisted vehicle, the thrust force is provided by devices with the propeller and the sail. From this consideration, the proper sail force compensation is derived on the basis of information about the current heading angle and the wind direction. The corresponding control law can guarantee the energy-saving for the propeller; and 3) in the algorithm, the system uncertainties are remodeled by the neural-network approximator. Furthermore, by fusion of the robust neural damping and dynamic surface control (DSC) techniques, the corresponding gain-related adaptive law is developed to address constraints of the gain uncertainty and the environmental disturbances. Through the Lyapunov theorem, all signals of the closed-loop control system have been proved to be with the semiglobal uniform ultimate bounded (SGUUB) stability, including the triggered time point and the intermediate triggered interval. Finally, the numerical simulation and the practical experiment are illustrated to verify the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.

Affective computing based on electroencephalogram (EEG) has gained increasing attention for its objectivity in measuring emotional states. While positive emotions play a crucial role in various real-world applications, such as human-computer interactions, the state-of-the-art EEG datasets have primarily focused on negative emotions, with less consideration given to positive emotions. Meanwhile, these datasets usually have a relatively small sample size, limiting exploration of the important issue of cross-subject affective computing. The proposed Finer-grained Affective Computing EEG Dataset (FACED) aimed to address these issues by recording 32-channel EEG signals from 123 subjects. During the experiment, subjects watched 28 emotion-elicitation video clips covering nine emotion categories (amusement, inspiration, joy, tenderness; anger, fear, disgust, sadness, and neutral emotion), providing a fine-grained and balanced categorization on both the positive and negative sides of emotion. The validation results show that emotion categories can be effectively recognized based on EEG signals at both the intra-subject and the cross-subject levels. The FACED dataset is expected to contribute to developing EEG-based affective computing algorithms for real-world applications.

The behavioral differentiation of positive emotions has recently been studied in terms of their discrete adaptive functions or appraising profiles. Some preliminary neurophysiological evidences have been found with electroencephalography or autonomic nervous system measurements such as heart rate, skin conductance, etc. However, the brain’s hemodynamic responses to different positive emotions remain largely unknown. In the present study, the functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) technique was employed. With this tool, we for the first time reported recognizable discrete positive emotions using fNIRS signals. Thirteen participants watched 30 emotional video clips to elicit 10 typical kinds of positive emotions (joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe, and love), and their frontal neural activities were simultaneously recorded with a 24-channel fNIRS system. The multidimensional scaling analysis of participants’ subjective ratings on these 10 positive emotions revealed three distinct clusters, which could be interpreted as “playfulness” for amusement, joy, interest, “encouragement” for awe, gratitude, hope, inspiration, pride, and “harmony” for love, serenity. Hemodynamic responses to these three positive emotion clusters showed distinct patterns, and HbO-based individual-level binary classifications between them achieved an averaged accuracy of 73.79 ± 11.49% (77.56 ± 7.39% for encouragement vs. harmony, 73.29 ± 11.87% for playfulness vs. harmony, 70.51 ± 13.96% for encouragement vs. harmony). Benefited from fNIRS’s high portability, low running cost and the relative robustness against motion and electrical artifacts, our findings provided support for implementing a more fine-grained emotion recognition system with subdivided positive emotion categories.

In this paper, a novel independent brain-computer interface (BCI) system based on covert non-spatial visual selective attention of two superimposed illusory surfaces is described. Perception of two superimposed surfaces was induced by two sets of dots with different colors rotating in opposite directions. The surfaces flickered at different frequencies and elicited distinguishable steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs) over parietal and occipital areas of the brain. By selectively attending to one of the two surfaces, the SSVEP amplitude at the corresponding frequency was enhanced. An online BCI system utilizing the attentional modulation of SSVEP was implemented and a 3-day online training program with healthy subjects was carried out. The study was conducted with Chinese subjects at Tsinghua University, and German subjects at University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE) using identical stimulation software and equivalent technical setup. A general improvement of control accuracy with training was observed in 8 out of 18 subjects. An averaged online classification accuracy of 72.6 +/- 16.1% was achieved on the last training day. The system renders SSVEP-based BCI paradigms possible for paralyzed patients with substantial head or ocular motor impairments by employing covert attention shifts instead of changing gaze direction.

Compared with the well documented neurophysiological findings on negative emotions, much less is known about positive emotions. In the present study, we explored the EEG correlates of ten different positive emotions (joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe, and love). A group of 20 participants were invited to watch 30 short film clips with their EEGs simultaneously recorded. Distinct topographical patterns for different positive emotions were found for the correlation coefficients between the subjective ratings on the ten positive emotions per film clip and the corresponding EEG spectral powers in different frequency bands. Based on the similarities of the participants’ ratings on the ten positive emotions, these emotions were further clustered into three representative clusters, as ‘encouragement’ for awe, gratitude, hope, inspiration, pride, ‘playfulness’ for amusement, joy, interest, and ‘harmony’ for love, serenity. Using the EEG spectral powers as features, both the binary classification on the higher and lower ratings on these positive emotions and the binary classification between the three positive emotion clusters, achieved accuracies of approximately 80% and above. To our knowledge, our study provides the first piece of evidence on the EEG correlates of different positive emotions.