Measuring Realistic Emotional Perception With EEG: A Comparison of Multimodal Videos and Naturalistic Scenes

Emotional experiences involve dynamic multisensory perception, yet most EEG research uses unimodal stimuli such as naturalistic scene photographs. Recent research suggests that realistic emotional videos reliably reduce the amplitude of a steady-state visual evoked potential (ssVEP) elicited by a flickering border. Here, we examine the extent to which this video-ssVEP measure compares with the well-established Late Positive Potential (LPP) that is reliably larger for emotional relative to neutral scenes. To address this question, 45 participants viewed 90 matched pairs of realistic videos and scenes. Consistent with prior work, reduced 7-8 Hz ssVEP amplitude was evident during emotional relative to neutral videos. However, this reduction in power was not specific to the driving frequency of 7.5 Hz, and in fact, Fourier transformation analyses limited to 7.5 Hz were not modulated by video content. Still, at the group level, the video-driven reductions in 7-8 Hz power and LPP modulation by scenes produced similarly large valence effects, and both measures strongly correlated with arousal ratings. Consistent with previous research, the scene-LPP was sensitive to specific emotional contents (erotica and gore) somewhat inconsistent arousal ratings. In contrast, the video-driven oscillation modulation did not show this content sensitivity and was better explained by individual arousal ratings per video clip. In sum, these results show that the 7.5 Hz flickering-border paradigm does not index emotional engagement with video stimuli, yet emotional videos do evoke robust decreases in 3-10 Hz oscillatory power that is somewhat distinct from emotional modulation of the scene-evoked LPP. Matched emotional video and scenes evoke large EEG responses compared with neutral content within-participant. Our findings align with previous research indicating that video modulation of power around the evoked 7.5 Hz ssVEP frequency (7-8 Hz) serves as a reliable emotional measure. However, further analyses reveal that this effect is attributable to a general decrease in power across the 3-10 Hz frequency range.