AbstractIn this paper, a Fuzzy Hidden Markov Model (FHMM) for electrocardiogram (ECG)‐based emotion recognition is proposed. The FHMM model is modeled using the fuzzy membership of each class of feature vectors to compute the elements of the matric in the model. Each element in the matric is determined by the two nearest classes of feature vectors with fuzzy classification to avoid the winner‐takes‐all situation that usually happens in tradition discrete Hidden Markov Models (HMM) and that reduces the accuracy of the modeling results. The FHMM modeling proposed in this paper can improve the precision of traditional discrete HMM modeling. Also, the features for emotion recognition, which are selected according to those used in prior research, are calculated from ECG signals. The selected features form a feature vector and these are calculated for all ECG signals. Some feature vectors are used to train the FHMM model and the remaining are used for testing. Experimental results show that the proposed FHMM model can achieve impressive improvements on the three indices, sensitivities (Se%), positive predictive value (PPV%), and total classification accuracy (TCA%), compared to traditional HMM. Moreover, compared to some existing studies, the recognition rates of the proposed method are higher. These results verify the efficiency of the proposed method for emotion recognition from ECG signals.