Mapping Emotions in the Brain: A Bi-Hemispheric Neural Model with Explainable Deep Learning

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Hauptverfasser: Freire-Obregón, David, Dubiel, Agnieszka, Vinodkumar, Prasoon Kumar, Anbarjafari, Gholamreza, Kamińska, Dorota, Castrillón-Santana, Modesto
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Freire-Obregón, David
Dubiel, Agnieszka
Vinodkumar, Prasoon Kumar
Anbarjafari, Gholamreza
Kamińska, Dorota
Castrillón-Santana, Modesto
author_facet Freire-Obregón, David
Dubiel, Agnieszka
Vinodkumar, Prasoon Kumar
Anbarjafari, Gholamreza
Kamińska, Dorota
Castrillón-Santana, Modesto
contents Recent advances have shown promise in emotion recognition from electroencephalogram (EEG) signals by employing bi-hemispheric neural architectures that incorporate neuroscientific priors into deep learning models. However, interpretability remains a significant limitation for their application in sensitive fields such as affective computing and cognitive modeling. In this work, we introduce a post-hoc interpretability framework tailored to dual-stream EEG classifiers, extending the Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME) approach to accommodate structured, bi-hemispheric inputs. Our method adapts LIME to handle structured two-branch inputs corresponding to left and right-hemisphere EEG channel groups. It decomposes prediction relevance into per-channel contributions across hemispheres and emotional classes. We apply this framework to a previously validated dual-branch recurrent neural network trained on EmoNeuroDB, a dataset of EEG recordings captured during a VR-based emotion elicitation task. The resulting explanations reveal emotion-specific hemispheric activation patterns consistent with known neurophysiological phenomena, such as frontal lateralization in joy and posterior asymmetry in sadness. Furthermore, we aggregate local explanations across samples to derive global channel importance profiles, enabling a neurophysiologically grounded interpretation of the model's decisions. Correlation analysis between symmetric electrodes further highlights the model's emotion-dependent lateralization behavior, supporting the functional asymmetries reported in affective neuroscience.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_12625
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Mapping Emotions in the Brain: A Bi-Hemispheric Neural Model with Explainable Deep Learning
Freire-Obregón, David
Dubiel, Agnieszka
Vinodkumar, Prasoon Kumar
Anbarjafari, Gholamreza
Kamińska, Dorota
Castrillón-Santana, Modesto
Neurons and Cognition
Human-Computer Interaction
Signal Processing
Recent advances have shown promise in emotion recognition from electroencephalogram (EEG) signals by employing bi-hemispheric neural architectures that incorporate neuroscientific priors into deep learning models. However, interpretability remains a significant limitation for their application in sensitive fields such as affective computing and cognitive modeling. In this work, we introduce a post-hoc interpretability framework tailored to dual-stream EEG classifiers, extending the Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME) approach to accommodate structured, bi-hemispheric inputs. Our method adapts LIME to handle structured two-branch inputs corresponding to left and right-hemisphere EEG channel groups. It decomposes prediction relevance into per-channel contributions across hemispheres and emotional classes. We apply this framework to a previously validated dual-branch recurrent neural network trained on EmoNeuroDB, a dataset of EEG recordings captured during a VR-based emotion elicitation task. The resulting explanations reveal emotion-specific hemispheric activation patterns consistent with known neurophysiological phenomena, such as frontal lateralization in joy and posterior asymmetry in sadness. Furthermore, we aggregate local explanations across samples to derive global channel importance profiles, enabling a neurophysiologically grounded interpretation of the model's decisions. Correlation analysis between symmetric electrodes further highlights the model's emotion-dependent lateralization behavior, supporting the functional asymmetries reported in affective neuroscience.
title Mapping Emotions in the Brain: A Bi-Hemispheric Neural Model with Explainable Deep Learning
topic Neurons and Cognition
Human-Computer Interaction
Signal Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12625