12:40 PM - 1:00 PM
[4F2-OS-11a-03] Measuring affective sharing between two people from simultaneously recorded EEG signals
Keywords:Empathy, Affective sharing, EEG, Hyperscanning
Empathy has been studied intensively in the field of human-machine interaction and human-human interaction.In many of these studies, empathy is subjectively measured by questionnaire. We propose a method to directly measure human empathy from neural potential activity. In this research, EEG signals were recorded simultaneously from two subjects engaged in emotional communication. After time frequency analysis was performed on the recorded Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals, a cross correlation functions between EEG signals of two subjects were calculated.To investigate the significance of cross correlations, paired t-test and false discovery rate correction were performed.As a result, there was a significant cross correlation in the gamma frequency band in the joy condition.In addition, there was a marginally significant correlation in the sadness condition.From these results we showed the possibility to measure empathy from cross correlation of EEG signals recorded from two subjects.