Abstract
It is widely accepted that physical exercises (PEs) not only are good for fitness but also contribute to mental health and well-being. The positive influence of PEs on emotion has become a topic of much excitement. However, a quantitative study is required to discuss the effect of short-term moderate-intensity PE on the emotional response by using electroencephalogram (EEG) asymmetry. The experiments, including 20-min moderate-intensity cycling and EEG data acquisition with picture-induced emotion assessment protocol, were designed in this paper. The experiment procedure consists of two emotion assessment sessions, each of which contains 24 pictures. About 80 participants were randomly allocated into the exercise group and the control group. Participants in the exercise group were instructed to have a 20-min moderate-intensity cycling after the first assessment session, then rested until their heart rates recovered to baselines and their emotional states were assessed again in the second session. The control group only had a 20-min break without the cycling exercise between the two sessions. It was observed that, in the control group, the EEG asymmetry had no significant difference in these two assessment sessions for both positive and negative stimulations. However, in the exercise group, the difference of the EEG asymmetry before and after PE was significant only in response to negative stimulations. Further, the in-depth analysis of EEG asymmetry index changes of individual participants shows that the short-term moderate-intensity PE has a positive impact in response to negative stimulations. The proposed experiments show that the negative emotional experience can be reduced by the moderate-intensity PE and support the hypothesis that the moderate-intensity PE is good at improving emotional response to negative stimulations. This study provides the evidence of positive effects of PE in the domain of emotion regulation with experimental data.
Highlights
Emotion experience is a complex procedure of neurobiological activity related to sensation, consciousness, and behavior that reflects the personal significance of a thing, event, or state of affairs
With all the asymmetry indices collected, statistical comparisons of all segments were made to evaluate the effect of shortterm moderate-intensity physical exercises (PEs) on emotion regulation
K,i(minj Asy k, i, j ) 8n where n is the number of subjects, 37 in the exercise group, and 33 in the control group, respectively
Summary
Emotion experience is a complex procedure of neurobiological activity related to sensation, consciousness, and behavior that reflects the personal significance of a thing, event, or state of affairs. With the rapid development of computer and information technology, the affective computing can be used to understand the emotion and behavior of a person and analyze how the emotion of the person changes. This has gained intense attention in biomedical engineering, computer science, and psychophysiology in the last few decades. Sometimes, the mood of an individual will swing from feeling confident and joy to feeling worried and depressed in a short period of time, and vice versa Another example is that the depressing or happy feeling can last longer at a higher intensity level to a great extent. The study of emotion change is about which emotions we have, when, how, and to what degree we have them, known as emotion regulation (Gross, 1998, 1999)
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