Exploring Sex Differences in Key Frequency Bands and Channel Connections for EEG-based Emotion Recognition

Previous studies have demonstrated the existence of sex differences in emotion recognition by comparing the performance of same-sex and cross-sex training strategies. However, the EEG properties behind the sex differences have not been fully explored. To fill this research gap, we aim to investigate the sex differences in key frequency bands and channel connections of EEG signals. The single-modality attentive simple graph convolutional network (ASGC) is applied to three datasets SEED, SEED-IV and SEED-V under subject-dependence conditions. The classification rates are 90.86 ±4.84%, 83.14 ± 8.84% and 78.33±7.83%, respectively. The adjacency matrices learned by ASGC indicate that females and males have similar channel-connection patterns, but the degree of importance of channel connections varies by sex. Additionally, by comparing the classification results of 5 frequency bands, we find that males and females represent similar frequency band characteristics, i.e., high-frequency bands achieve better performance, indicating that these frequency bands are more related to emotion processing. Finally, we conduct the cross-subject experiment using ASGC and find that the same-sex strategy outperforms the cross-sex strategy, which is consistent with previous studies. The results also imply that males may be more suitable for sex generalization. However, this finding needs the support of more samples and advanced algorithms.