AN EEG PROTOCOL FOR INVESTIGATING EMOTION RELATED CORTICAL ACTIVITY IN IMMERSIVE VIRTUAL REALITY

Abstract

Emotion processing depends on distributed cortical networks and is frequently disrupted across neurological and psychiatric disorders yet it is rarely assessed in clinical settings using electrophysiology. This paper is a pre-registered report that represents a specified protocol to characterise the neural correlates of emotions using (electroencephalogram) EEG in an immersive virtual reality(VR) registered with CTRI(India). Three confirmatory hypotheses are proposed, (H1)Theta and Alpha power will show condition dependent modulation, (H2) Frontal Alpha Asymmetry will show valence related hemispheric lateralisation (H3) functional connectivity and graph theoretical networks differ across different emotion conditions. A total of 120 participants will be exposed to positive, negative and neutral emotions in VR while EEG signals are recorded using international  standard 10-20 systems. EEG preprocessing and statistical analysis are predefined with repeated measures using ANOVA used for confirmatory testing. A secondary exploratory Support vector machine (SVM) analysis will evaluate whether emotional states can be differentiated across different conditions in EEG features. This protocol is designed for the implementation of standard clinical EEG systems providing a translational framework for future studies in the clinical populations.