A personality-guided affective brain—computer interface for implementation of emotional intelligence in machines

Affective brain—computer interfaces have become an increasingly important topic to achieve emotional intelligence in human—machine collaboration. However, due to the complexity of electroencephalogram (EEG) signals and the individual differences in emotional response, it is still a great challenge to design a reliable and effective model. Considering the influence of personality traits on emotional response, it would be helpful to integrate personality information and EEG signals for emotion recognition. This study proposes a personality-guided attention neural network that can use personality information to learn effective EEG representations for emotion recognition. Specifically, we first use a convolutional neural network to extract rich temporal and regional representations of EEG signals, and a special convolution kernel is designed to learn inter- and intra-regional correlations simultaneously. Second, inspired by the fact that electrodes within distinct brain scalp regions play different roles in emotion recognition, a personality-guided regional-attention mechanism is proposed to further explore the contributions of electrodes within a region and between regions. Finally, attention-based long short-term memory is designed to explore the temporal dynamics of EEG signals. Experiments on the AMIGOS dataset, which is a dataset for multimodal research for affect, personality traits, and mood on individuals and groups, show that the proposed method can significantly improve the performance of subject-independent emotion recognition and outperform state-of-the-art methods.