How do you identify fear immediately? How do you classify fear from EEG? How would you quantify fear? These questions bothered me in the beginning when I started researching the intersection of emotions, affective physiological responses and EEG signal processing. I imagined a biofeedback computer game / therapy program that helps people conquer their fears by rewarding them in the process. As time went on, my empirical knowledge and experimental data were extended, which, though changed the questions, not the vision. Here I'd like to outline how it all happened, what are the results and prospects of the research.
Experiment
While reading papers on EEG response upon fear stimulation, I was quite annoyed that the stimuli used in previous experiments were mostly IAPS images or video clips from horror movies (yeah, The Shining) completely taken out of context. To this day I believe that such stimuli are not sufficient to evoke strong enough emotional responses in a time period higher than a couple of seconds, and thus unable to provide insight into the big picture of fear regulation.
The experimental design hasn't changed much since my previous measurements, but gameplay and webcam videos were also recorded this time, in addition to EEG, heart rate (HR), and galvanic skin response (GSR) vital signals. First open-, then closed-eye measurements were taken for Individual Alpha Frequency estimation. Participants then played the "daylight" version of a computer FPS game as the baseline measurement. Only the "night" version contained fear inducing stimuli.
