Does tang poetry affect human emotional state? A pilot study by EEG

Tang poetry, as one of the most typical ways for ancient Chinese to express their emotions, has been continuously inherited for millenniums in China. Nowadays, though our way of life has changed dramatically, the traditional culture about Tang poetry is still affecting us deeply. However, the psychological effect of Tang poetry remains unclear currently. Motivated by this, we aim to investigate the impact of Tang poetry on human emotional state through designing effective experimental paradigm. We gathered 16 Tang poetry video clips with different genres, and played these to 18 subjects, meanwhile recorded their brain neural responses via Electroencephalogram (EEG). A questionnaire was designed to record subjects' subjective ratings of the emotional experience when watching the Tang poetry videos. Through analyzing the questionnaires, we found that Tang poetry can indeed induce the subjects' specific emotions. Finally, we performed a pilot analysis of the recorded EEG signals and the subjective ratings, for exploring the correlation of the brain activity with the emotional states. The results indicate that the Tang poetry can be used as a kind of emotive stimuli in affective computing research, and the EEG induced by Tang poetry can be utilized to probe the human's internal emotions.