Minimum Spanning Tree Brain Network Topology Predicts Individual Differences in the Structure of Affective Experience

Abstract

Subjective feelings of emotion differ in the extent to which some might focus on pleasure or displeasure and some might emphasize their arousal in the reports of emotional experience. In this paper, we examine whether functional brain connectivity is modulated by individual differences in the subjective feelings of emotion. We adopt the public available DEAP dataset and utilize the unsupervised clustering method to delineate reports of emotional valence and arousal profiles in the data. Results provide evidence of two subgroups: one group consistently rates high in arousal and low in valence regarding the emotional stimulus, whereas the other group rates high in valence and low in arousal. Two groups further differ in their minimum spanning tree characteristics derived from EEG signals. Together, these findings confirm the individual differences in emotional experience and suggest the distinct underlying neural processing mechanisms.

Keywords: Emotion, individual differences, Minimum Spanning Tree, cluster analysis, DEAP